Technology guru Clay Shirky Photograph: Suki Dhanda, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/15/this-much-i-know-clay-shirky-technology
I’ve started the new book assignment this week. I’m reading Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: How Technologies Make Consumers into your Collaborators. The reason I wished to read this book is it touches on themes that I am encountering in my studies as I approach my dissertation and a paper I’m presenting for the upcoming PCA/ACA conference in Boston (in less than three weeks). The idea of taking advantage of the affordances of a networked society is central to my paper which discusses how new media have changed how businesses operate, in particular the industry of broadcasting, and how industries have had to respond to these changes.
I wasn’t familiar with his last book, Here Comes Everybody, so I thought I’d start not only with reading the Cognitive Surplus book, but also by looking at where Shirky has come from so I can see the trajectory of his work. Fortunately for me, there was no lack of his lectures on Youtube. Here’s a shorter one (only 21 minutes long):
Clay Shirky — Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organising without Organisations
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSJCcDiD-zw)
“Here comes Everybody†definitely speaks to the recent “Occupy†movements and the organized public outcry regarding the shooting of Treyvon Martin.
Looking at Another Class Wiki Page
I looked at Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media class wiki page, created by Jennifer Buckner and Susanne Nobles. It’s funny how so many of the issues brought up in one book overlap in others we’ve read. McLuhan’s idea of “make happen agents vs. “make aware agents†really feeds into Shirky’s claims that new media are allowing connections that will affect (and already have affected) social structures.
McLuhan’s view of media is that it is creating a passive audience that is fascinated with gazing at itself sort of like Narcissus. This view could be said of 20th Century media, but according to Shirky, that phenomenon occurred simply because technologies such as television and radio were “imbalancedâ€â€”these media allowed for communication to go OUT but no one had an opportunity to respond to it directly, so they didn’t try. This of course would change in the 21st Century when the same technologies purchased for consumption could also be used for producing and sharing the users’ own communications.
Jennifer and Susanne did a great job encapsulating a lot of material in their entry and liked their choice of pictures and the video of McLuhan (whom I had never seen speak before). The video they linked to of McLuhan’s response to a question about media’s effect on the future of education was very interesting, although I admit a bit abstract. His ideas of how everything boils down to “the file†and that people will no longer be compelled to go TO an office to work was quite prophetic.
Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New York: Penguin Books.