This assignment is due by Monday, January 30 at NOON. No exceptions, unless you talk with Dr. Williams.
Please read Clay Shirky's COGNITIVE SURPLUS, Chapter 1, and then, IYOW, share THREE specific observations Shirky makes that you find important, and ONE specific question you would ask of him about his conclusions. Aim for 3-5 sentences for EACH observation, and make your question ONE SENTENCE and VERY precise.
Please post here, toolbox'ers.
ReplyDelete- The Internet has given people an alternative way to spend free time other than watching television, and it is freaking the television industry out. The Internets endless outlets to create and share make it more appealing than television to a generation with more free time.
Delete-The Internet allows us to create and seek out our own media. While television, books, and magazines were once the main source for information, we now have the World Wide Web at our fingertips, allowing us to research and learn about anything we may find.
- The "Milkshake Mistake" shows that we must be open-minded when discussing media. It is important to focus on what the public wants, not just what the "product" (internet) will be. We must also be open-minded to change and accept that just because a form of media worked in the past, that doesn't mean it will necessarily work in the future.
QUESTION: What do you think the television industry producing less sitcoms and more reality televsion says about media and society today?
- Television (and really all media) fills the void of loneliness better than any other non-living thing. It enables people to engage in activities which isolate them from the real world and real people. Television encourages people to value materialism over social satisfaction.
ReplyDelete-The internet and sites like Youtube are bringing people away from TV consumption. While people are still focusing their attention on media, younger people are doing it in a way where they are still interacting. Everyone who participates is interconnected, which promotes active interaction rather than passive television consumption.
- By sharing user-generated content with other users, a whole new activity is created beyond the making of something. People create things, like lolcats, to share with others and not to keep with themselves. They are also not producing media for a general audience - there are communities of people who enjoy the same media, and the media is shared among that community.
Question: How did you come to the conclusion that free time is something that can be harnessed and used collectively as a social purpose?
- There was a study done claiming that unhappy people watch more television than happy people. Another connection to the unhappy study are lonely people. Scientists believe that some watch more television because it makes them feel like they have friends, like they are with company.
ReplyDelete- Past generations grew up with only television, so they believed, and some still do, that the younger generations are growing up as bigger consumers and less interactive because our time is being spent on a computer surfing the web. This common mistake is called the Milkshake Mistake, meaning that society builds up "traditions" of everyday things, like what to have for breakfast or what media source we want to spend out free time using, that not everyone follows and sometimes are questioned for it.
- In fact, some say that the young generations are more connected than ever through the web. There are hundreds of sites to share, like, and comment on friends, or strangers, posts. Sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Tumblr are connecting people worldwide on a whole new virtual level.
Question: You seem like the borderline between generations, so do you prefer television or the web?
1) Strong connections between John Frederick Taylor's "Scientific Management" and it's effect in education, by tying theories of the industrial revolution to the rise of consumerism. Makes me think of the "Story of Stuff" and Sir Ken Robinson's views on "education"
ReplyDelete2) Corporate sociologists are using the "Milkshake Mistake" to manipulate public perception, and create public demand without the public being fully aware of their participation in the agency process.
3) The lack of productive useful learning in schools fuels the desire for usage of the surplus. Interconnections galore.
Q: Would a series of multi-level integrated interpersonal skills classes in all levels of education help rehabilitate public perception through-out the next few generations. Changing the view of media from "imaginary friend" machine, to a set of tools for the greater collective ethical good of human kind?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete1. Television, much like Gin, is “palatable and intoxicating” something Shirkey refers to as a “winning combination”. Whereas Gin was a means of passing time in an increasing industrial society, television is a means for absorbing our time. Shirkey notes that the Gin craze died out s society became more acclimated to it's new structure. Television is more all encompassing: even if there is “nothing” on, most Americans could find something to watch.
ReplyDelete2. The greatest danger that television consumption possess to society is the amount of time it is capable of absorbing. Shirkey relates it to a treadmill: no matter how much we use the machine, we really aren't getting very far. It also detaches the individual from society at large, as we each plunk down in front of our individual boxes to share a media experience.
3. Television's major downfall is that it is not a participatory form of media for the masses. While want to be entertained, they just as eagerly want to learn from that entertainment and go off to create something of their own. Shirkey echoes one of my favorite quotes, by Philip Anderson, “more is different”; in regards to media he is exactly right. As media and media delivery systems grow, one-sided consumption via television is likely to be replaced participatory media via the Internet.
Question: Is there a way to balance our desire for innovative and new media while avoiding the risk of becoming a “couch-potato”?
1. People have time to fill in their lives with the rising amount of free time developed countries currently have. Television fills this free time in most people’s lives. The characters in a show make the people watching feel as though they are interacting with real individuals when they aren’t. This reliance on television can lead people to underestimate the need for real interaction with other real people.
ReplyDelete2. Younger generations have begun to turn away from television as pure consumption and began to involve themselves in the experience through online media options. Young people watching television now are more likely to comment on it, share it, or rank it, all with other people. This online interaction has turned the traditionally passive consumption of television into a more active activity.
3. This rise in user-generated content being created and shared online has changed the way people connect to others in society. Traditionally, most interactions occurred face to face, this explosion of online interaction has led to people being able to connect with people from across the world without every meeting them in real life.
Question: If people currently spend all their free time watching television, what role do you think television should have in our lives?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete1. Page 3, Paragraph 2 - "Gin consumption was treated as the problem to be solved, when in fact it was a reaction to the real problem-dramatic social change and the inability of older social models to adapt."
ReplyDeleteI wonder where he is going with this. Could it be that the Internet blowing up in '99 was something that no one expected, and the old social structures of information access and collaboration were smashed to bits? Shirky goes on to say that the real problem to the aging social order is free time, which we have never had much of.
2. Page 6, Paragraph 2. "Since the 1950s,any country with rising GDP has invariably seen a reordering of human affairs; in the whole of the developed world, the three most common activities are work, sleep, and watching TV."
While this book was published in 2010, I wonder if this statistic is still accurate. Maybe it’s my demographic, but I don't own any sort of cable or satellite TV; All I have is the Internet, and things that connect to it. Sure, I might be watching Netflix on the TV, but that doesn't count as watching sitcoms, the news, and the commercials and social stigma that comes from watching American Idol or Jersey Shore. Who is Snooky, anyway?
And finally, 3 - Page 19, paragraph 2 - "The atomization of social life in the twentieth century left us so far removed from participatory culture that we needed the phrase to describe it."
Wow. I guess I'm a youngster, because I might be the last to remember a life without the Internet. It wasn't long in my lifetime, though, that I could distinctly remember the grinding sounds of a dial-up modem. I for one, am glad we as a community foster and welcome collaboration. I can't imagine what the world would be like if we had only our childhoods to be creative.
Question: If you were a savvy advertiser, how would you go about spreading your message to the best effect?
In the opening chapter of his book "Cognitive Surplus", Clay Shirky states "In the space of a generation watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world" is a testament to the increasing aggregate demand that arose during the postwar years of the 1940s and suburbanization. The end result of this being that, in the blink of a CBS eye, a surrogacy of social interaction and norms was rapidly and overwhelmingly adopted. In part, this was due to the rise of the new product: the television; but the vast new availability of free (or surplus) and how citizens were spending it was now transforming social and cultural norms.
ReplyDeleteUpon having a less than perfect day, the citizen, feeling blue, confided in their TV family and friends rather than those actually existing within their lives. We were, in short order, becoming more intertwined with our screens than our fellow citizens.
"When you aggregate a lot of something, it behaves in new ways, and our new communications tools are aggregating our individual ability to create and share, at unprecedented levels of more." This rather unsexy and abstract articulation of aggregation is best summarized by Shirky himself who uses the massive proliferation of cameras and camera phones (and their increasing likelihood of capturing an event) to illustrate the principle. No more (to my great chagrin) are we reliant upon reporters, journalists, photographers, and the wire-services to gather and sort out the day's events for us. There's a new wire-service out there that's infinitely more powerful, multi-faceted, and fast-acting than anything that has come before. It is you, I, and anybody else that happens to have a smartphone. Within seconds of an event occurring, the word is out and the right of the people to inform themselves and each other is exercised ad infinitum.
The final, and perhaps most remarkable, observation I've uncovered in this first chapter of Shirky's book is his spot-on analysis of LOLcats. That's right, LOLcats. For all their stupidity and civic vacuous-ness, LOLcats offer an interesting glimpse into the new ways we are transforming the media landscape on a fundamental level. "There are ways to do a LOLcat wrong, which means there are ways to do it right, which means there is some metric of quality, even if limited. However little the world needs the next LOLcat, the message of YOU CAN PLAY THIS GAME TOO is a change from what we're used to in the media landscape. The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act." This is a massive sea-change from the status quo. Gone are the days when we were simply the consumers that swallow, without tasting, whatever it is that is fed to us by media makers. We are entering a new paradigm in which were are the media-makers, and though any one of these mediums may have the half life of a mayfly or of plutonium 234, we are making a whole heck of a lot of it, and we're doing it 24/7. The troubling thing to me is, we're still making the same garbage and, in most cases, are still willing to swallow our food without tasting it.
My question to be posed to the great wide open is, how, as a citizenry foraging through the uncharted wilderness of information, might we utilize both the existing and emerging tools in such a way that we may create and consume in such a way that promotes the development and refinement of our media pallets, rather than deadening them like so much sugar?
CAN I HAS A NEW ERA???
So sitcoms are the new gin. That is not at all what I expected Shirky to say but I get it- I respect it. The point is that with drastic societal changes, people deal by not dealing (i.e. drinking themselves into oblivion, immersing themselves into a constructed reality on television, etc.). TV isn’t the problem, it’s the reaction, which then of course becomes a problem. “I drink because my life sucks and my life sucks because I’m drunk all the time.”
ReplyDeleteAlso shocked to hear that the three most common activities in developed societies are work, sleep, and TV. WATCHING TELEVISION IS MORE COMMON THAN EATING?? Anyhow, I’m going to ignore that and just acknowledge Shirky’s claim that happy people watch less television. Whoda thunk it? The time put into television consumption could have been spent accomplishing goals, helping out a neighbor, visiting with friends, knitting a scarf, writing a song, petting the dog, cooking, reading for god’s sake- all of which is more fulfilling. We still get what we put into life and watching television isn’t exactly a notable contribution- it’s mindless (and lonely).
So if a person spent two hours every day engaging in face to face interaction or even chatting with a friend online instead of spending those two hours with Ray Romano as their surrogate pal, he might find more enjoyment out of life. We are creatures of community- we thrive off of interaction with other human beings. We want to access one another! Online social networks are making that possible in our modern society. We can connect. We can coordinate. We can communicate with one another. We can stop crying. Whoa. It wasn’t always this easy.
Q: Do you drink gin? What’s your favorite sitcom? Do you think the internet is lowering suicide rates?
Let's explore and dive deep here, posse...
ReplyDelete1. Societies use things like gin or television to deal with certain changes or needs. Television has allowed us to deal with the increase in free time since the advent of the 8 hour workday. Television has also worked as a substitute for social interaction. The internet, on the other hand, has been able to fill our free time in a more socially interactive participatory fashion.
ReplyDelete2. We are moving from an almost entirely top down media culture based on consumption to a more participatory culture based on consumer feedback, a wider range of producers, and sharing. This new participatory media culture allows ordinary people to tell their stories. Even low grade entertainment like lolcatz could be called an improvement since they are created for an audience by an audience.
3. This new participatory culture allows us to make a better use of our free time. Rather than simply observing already created content, users rate, edit, and create their own. The participatory media also enables new collective projects like Wikipedia and Ushahidi which compile the ideas and experiences of many and are greater than the sum of their parts.
Q. Is there a danger in the easy capture of globally significant events?