According to Clay Shirky's new book, Cognitive
Surplus, the average American
watches twenty hours of television a week. That is a part time job. We
watch more television every year, but there is a curious trend occuring;
people of the younger generations are watching less. While television provides
people comfort, a sense of belonging, even when alone, and it tells stories
and helps people pass the time, more people are spending more time creating
their own media, contributing to open source initiatives and wiki's, and
more. We are experiencing the birth of amazing possibilities that all of
this cognitive surplus will bring to the internet and the world.
Contents:
Chapter 1: Gin, Television, and Cognitive
Surplus
Chapter 2: Means
Chapter 3: Motive
Chapter 4: Opportunity
Chapter 5: Culture
Chapter 6: Personal, Communal, Public,
Civic
Chapter 7: Looking for the Mouse
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
While Cognitive
Surplus talks about the amount
of television we collectively watch, Shirky is not commenting on the quality
(or lack of it) of those shows that we watch. Rather, he points out the
number of hours we sit in front of the television consuming but not creating.
However, he does document some of the initiatives that have taken off when
people spend less time with the television and more time connecting with
people, creating new sites, and allowing individuals to create content.
Some of the choices he makes to illustrate his point could be lost on many
people, for example lolcats (the most popular site is icanhascheezburger.com),
but Shirky uses the example well - a simple site that allows anyone to
play. The best example is PatientsLikeMe.com where people contribute their
medical history, results from treatments, and more. It is so popular, and
the contributions so good, that it is has become the foremost site for
medical trials, a support group that the current medical community cannot
offer, and a clearinghouse for information and ideas.
Clay Shirky, in Cognitive
Surplus, isn't advocating that
we turn off the television, however he does illustrate what happens when
people find other avenues for their "free time." For the more
part, we are creating new communities, connecting with people, and providing
new avenues of creativity. Also, it is the younger generations that
are leading this inventiveness; they are watching less television, putting
more time into the internet and connecting people in new and original ways.
What we are seeing, experiencing on the internet demonstrates that "media"
is no longer passive. It is producing, consuming, and sharing and it is
open to everyone. The individual, or group, that takes a little time to
evaluate a situation where others have been provided a canned experience,
denied an opportunity, and ask "can we apply cognitive surplus to
this situation and make the experience better?" will probably be rewarded
for attempting the connections.
While not every advantage of "cognitive
surplus" benefits humanity, Shirky spends all of his time providing
positive anecdotes, while ignoring some of the "darker" aspects
of internet collectives. However, his optimism is contagious; he sees the
internet as a place for unbridled innovation and his examples reinforce
that point. If you have read Shirky's previous book, Here Comes
Everybody, where he talked about the power of leveraging the crowds,
Cognitive
Surplus is an excellent follow-up.
After leveraging the crowds, the next step is to harness that knowledge,
and time, to create new, interesting, and wonderful collaborative web sites.
Our imaginations will provide new opportunities and the internet will provide
the means to deliver creativity, sharing, and participation.
Lotusphere: Will it Jumpstart the IBM Lotus Brand?
Fri, Jan 13th 2012 9:30a Gregg Eldred Now in its 19th year, Lotusphere will once again attempt to make up the ground Lotus Notes lost as a result of shifts in strategy at IBM and changes in the market in the past few years. But with Lotus Notes facing an uphill battle, five days at "the happiest place on Earth" will have to go a long way.
. . . But even with the help of the Connect conference, some in the industry are concerned that Lotusphere '12 may be too little, too late.
Sandy Carter is quoted, but without the exclamati [read] Keywords: ibm
lotus
lotusphere
notes
network
wifi
109
Are Your Twitter Followers Yours? Or Your Company's?
Tue, Dec 27th 2011 8:20p Gregg Eldred In 2006 Noah Kravitz went to work for Phonedog, a news site specializing in mobile phone related news. During his four years as a writer for Phonedog, his Twitter profile, Phonedog_Noah, picked up 17,000 followers. When he left the company last October, he was told that he could keep the account, provided he tweeted about Phonedog once in a while. When he left, Kravitz changed the profileâs name to NoahKravitz, and proceeded to continue tweeting â including the occasional mention of Ph [read] Keywords: mobile
profile
twitter
121
Where are the PlayBooks?
Mon, Dec 19th 2011 10:00p Gregg Eldred Ah, the irony: over the past few weeks even RIM has admitted that the BlackBerry PlayBook is so unloved it canât even give it away, and now $1.7m-worth of the 7-inch slates have actually been stolen. A truck transporting 22 pallets of the PlayBook to Ontario, Canada, was parked up for the driver to take a rest break, The Herald Bulletin reports, when it was stolen by person or persons unknown.
More>
"Police said they have no suspects." Of course not, who wants to admit that they ha [read] Keywords: blackberry
rim
Microsoft Exec: Google's Problems in L.A. Wouldn't Have Happened to Us
Mon, Dec 19th 2011 10:00p Gregg Eldred From an interview with Tom Rizzo, Microsoft's senior director for online services, in Redmind Channel Partner.
RCP: Gartner recently endorsed Google Apps for Business as enterprise ready. Has that upped the competitive stakes, as far as you're concerned?
Rizzo: You know, the interesting thing about that Gartner report, I believe one of the 10 references listed was the city of L.A., and the LAPD has pulled out of deploying Google Apps. So I'd read through that list with a fine-toothed com [read] Keywords: ibm
lotus
email
enterprise
google
microsoft
office
We Could've Had a Great Economy
Thu, Dec 15th 2011 7:50a Gregg Eldred I suppose you could consider this a "political" post. With Hermain Cain as President, our economy could've really took off. [read] Keywords:
96
RIM in the News (and it has nothing to do with the PlayBook)
Mon, Dec 12th 2011 4:15p Gregg Eldred New details are emerging about the rowdy behaviour of two Research In Motion executives who were fired for disrupting an intercontinental flight â including that they managed to chew their way out of restraints after being handcuffed by crew members.
George Campbell, 45, and Paul Alexander Wilson, 38, each pleaded guilty to mischief for disrupting an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Beijing last week.
The plane landed instead in Vancouver, where a court later ordered them to pay $72,00 [read] Keywords: policies
research in motion
rim
IBM Documentation Needs Help
Wed, Dec 7th 2011 9:01p Gregg Eldred Redbooks, for all intents and purposes, are dead. At least as far as IBM Lotus is concerned. The future, we've been told, are wikis, blogs, and InfoCenters. True, most of the IBM Lotus wikis have been populated with the contents of existing Redbooks, however the information in the wikis and InfoCenters is a hit-or-miss proposition.
Let's take a look at one example of a miss.
Installing and configuring the IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway is a lot of fun, the documentation makes it appear a pai [read] Keywords: ibm
ldd
lotus
sametime
database
db2
google
sql
wiki
