Clay Shirky

The author of Here Comes Everybody explains how new media technologies are prompting a return from consumerism to collaboration, making predictions about imminent wide-scale creative innovations that will positively transform civilization.

Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

Cognitive Surplus

'Perhaps the most amazing fact about Shirky's incisive manual for building a better world is this: it's just possible that everything he promises may be true' Observer 'Fizzes with great insights . . . It's a delight to read and will change how you think about the future' Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing In the past, we filled our free time with the tools at our disposal. Television became a kind of universal part-time job, and sitcoms and soap operas sponged up our cognitive surplus: the collective surfeit of time, intellect and energy at our disposal. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. New tools don't just let us consume, but to create and to share. Clay Shirky's groundbreaking book reveals what is now happening with this previously untapped talent and goodwill. From lolcats to tools for tracking voter fraud and ethnic violence, he shows how we're using our cognitive surplus for the better, and what it means for the future. 'When Clay Shirky speaks . . . people listen. The author of the influential Here Comes Everybody is again driving conversation' TIME 'Shirky gives us a ruler by which to measure our contribution to the world. Watching TV will never be the same again' Guardian

erin

Nelson Zagalo

Clay Shirky is a wide known professor of media and great defender of internet based social technologies. The ideas presented in this book are at some points interesting and relevant, because they fight against the attacks these kinds of technologies always have to face when they emerge. However in doing that, and in such a short book, Shirky takes too much lightly the social aspects of life.

In short the cognitive surplus here talked about is the time you spend in the internet interacting, sharing and creating, instead of standing in your sofa watching television. The problem with this approach is that it forgets that people do not always want to interact, neither share, and less create. We are defined by a set of moods and behaviours, that change throughout the day, the week, or even month. 

Because when you've worked hard for an entire day, at the end of the day it rests you too little energy to keep pushing outwards yourself. Because one thing that Shirky never talks about is the economics behind all these creative production behaviours. All the examples given by Shirky work around free models, depending on having people that can support their free time to create and share, through other jobs in their lives.

On the other side, creating and creating self-realises ourselves, however we can't create without consuming. Assuming that everything we touch will have a bidirectional communication paradigm, is far from truth. And the question is not of being digital natives or not, the question is simpler, interaction is a different state from introspection.

Anyhow Shirky touch a lot of interesting ideas about the creative society, and the new possibilities created by the internet communication platform. Getting immediate feedback to our creations can not only maintain our motivation to keep creating, but can also help in the learning process, finding better creative paths to pursue, insisting and repeating, adding new ideas, mixing old ones.

The new creative technologies opened complete new ways for anyone to try wide ranges of activities and choose from experiencing them what to follow. In a world of too many choices, being able to experiment without investing too much effort, is highly important, because it can help people find their own hidden talents.

In the end the subject discussed, has not only one approach or one answer neither a right stand, as Shirky states, "Proponents of the new and defenders of the old can’t merely discuss the transition, because each group has systematic biases that make its overall vision untrustworthy". We're living this change in our society now, and in some years when we look back we'll for sure laugh about a lot of our naive ideas and fearful thoughts.

Cognitive Surplus Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

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