This assignment is due by Monday, February 13 at NOON. No exceptions, unless you talk with Dr. Williams.
Please read Clay Shirky's COGNITIVE SURPLUS, Chapters 5-7, 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.
PS - here's an excellent NYTimes article by David Carr on Clay Shirky, bread baking, and the limits of social media.
- Dominique Foray published a book called The Economics of Knowledge in which he describes the conditions of the combinability of knowledge. The first is the size of the community - Shirky gives the example of the community of people who know "Happy Birthday" being much greater than those who know Sanskrit poetry. The second is the cost of sharing - he gives the example of the printing press, which increased knowledge incredibly because it enabled virtually everyone to own books. The third condition is the clarity of knowledge, which just makes it easier for the knowledge to be understood by as many people as possible. There is also a fourth condition which is culture - a group has to do more than understand; members also have to understand each other.
ReplyDelete- Wilfred Bion did a study of a group of neurotics during WWII. He found that as a group, they were trying to defeat therapy. To the question "Are groups of people best thought of as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive unit?" he answered that humans are "hopelessly committed to both." This means that humans are both fundamentally individual and social, that we each have a rational mind and an emotional mind.
- Shirky provides sort of a formula for people who are starting a social media platform. He suggests to first start small, because people who want to start big can actually minimize their success. He urges people to ask "Why?" because some motivations can work well together, but some can clash. Shirky also notes that people need a reason to care about the opportunity being presented to them. He then compares two websites - one which succeeded, and one which did not, and explained how one site had an option for sharing bookmarks, and the other just incorporated them into the site.
Question: If you could create any social media platform, for any purpose with any features, what would you create?
-When Ryerson University found out Christopher Avenir was administrating a chemistry study group on Facebook with 146 other students participating in 2007, they came close to expelling him. The University believed that the Facebook group was wrong because individual student work should not be shared. Avenir, on the other hand, considered the Facebook group to be no different than tutoring. Shirky states that when things that were once inconvenient are not anymore it is important to conciously reexamine rules and opinions in order to move forward with new technology and possibilities.
ReplyDelete-With such personal group forum websites like PatientsLikeMe.com, which provides a space for patients with similar illnesses can share info and encouragement. Given that topics on the website range from treatment plans to infidelity, Shirky explains that there must be an openness philosophy in order to maintain a safe and productive space. Shirky suggests raising the rewards in trade for the risk of online social connection.
-Two women decided to film and photograph a trip they took to France where they only stayed with stangers and planned their trip through CouchSurfing.com, a public travelling website which provides plenty of safety information and reviews of hosts. Shirky then compares a story of two women filmmakers who hitch-hiked together and then seperately in white bridal dresses across the Mediterranean, which lead to one of the women getting raped and murdered.Shirky points out that there are obviously more risks when increasing communication and contact with others, but that there are straightforward ways to be safe when using new technologies.
Question: What are the most crucial safety precautions to take when using the internet?
Chapter 5
ReplyDeleteMonetary fines describe quite well the impact money has on people: fines for bad behavior don't actually have a deterring effect. They simply provide the act a cost, so that speeding isn't illegal so much as it is expensive. By monetizing behavior, it warps the way people think and act, finally having the opposite effect for which the fine exists in the first place.
Shirkey's example of the 1700th century Invisible College (pg 100) is a good example of how working together toward a goal is a surer path than working alone. The comparison of alchemists and chemists is profound and seems so obvious today. Yet not so long ago there were well regarded “scientists” who worked on assumption and prediction.
Using the Internet and social media to share information is potentially as dangerous as it is useful. Shirkey uses the example of a patient's support website, PatientsLikeMe.com, to illustrate that sharing must be done carefully to protect individuals privacy. Something as new as a site like this demands a shift in our culture, a move toward more open sharing, engaging our cognitive surplus to better society.
Question: The chapter ends with a question, will cognitive surplus be utilized for civic value. My question is, how would you suggest we move or continue moving in that direction?
Chapter 6
ReplyDeleteThe example of the Sri Ram Sene, a fundamentalist group who assaulted woman for dressing and acting in ways counter to Sene's religious believes, shows how social media can be used to promote a worthy cause. As Shirkey said, “politicians and police tend to react to threats more readily if there is evidence of public concern” (pg123). What better means of raising public concern than the Internet? Through this means it is possible for a small group of individuals to find support and bring their issue to the attention of those in power.
Shirkey quotes Dean Kamen on pg127, “in a free culture, you get what you celebrate”. This idea holds especially true in an online world. The added layer of connectivity provided by the Internet means we need not strive for “perfect individual freedom” or “perfect social control” (pg127). The middle ground, a place where the individual is part of a meaningful group, is in there somewhere and is now much easier to access thanks to social media's binding effect.
The summation of Shirkey's views on how best to use cognitive surplus fall into two possible categories, “Invisible College” and “Invisible High School”. His distinction is a bit harsh, but clearly the fun side of the Internet is already widespread and in little danger of diminishing. The next step, as Shirkey would have it, is to use this connectivity and our cognitive surplus to foster a culture of intellectual sharing, expanding humanities knowledge and presumably leading to break-through's that will benefit all of society.
Question: How do you see these new spawning online groups governing themselves? While the potential is high that they may learn something new or enact meaningful social change, it seems just as likely that they will dissolve into their own distractedness.
Chapter 7
Shirkey begins his last chapter with the thought that prior to widespread use of the Internet people primarily used up their free time rather than put it to use. The mass participatory nature of the Internet and the advent of social media means people can easily connect with others who share their views and interests. The last major hurdle, as far as Shirkey sees it, is motivation: the tools are there, now we simply need enough people to want to engage each other to make productive use of our cognitive surplus.
One of the shortfalls of widespread sharing online is that people are unpredictable; the thing that has our attention today could be completely passe tomorrow. To combat this, Shirkey suggests it is more relevant that the right opportunities be presented online. People will be interested in that which holds the most immediate value for them, so to take advantage of this, media producers will need to be one step ahead, providing people with the opportunity to engage in the desired ways. As Shirkey puts it in one of his headers: “behavior follows opportunity” (pg139).
Culture occurs between a balance of group sizes. Small groups work because everyone has fairly equal opportunity to have a voice, large groups work because they represent enough diversity that everyone feels included. It's the middle stage, when a group is too big to be perfectly focused, but too small to be socially acceptable for all it's members. According to Shirkey, it's in this between space that culture develops online; the norms and practices of this mediocre sized group will carry over to the greater community as the group grows, so that once it has achieved a sustainable mass of participants, the culture put in place by a few has become the norm.
Question: If the printing press utterly redefined the way people and society meet, how enormous will the shake up caused by the Web be? Or have we already experienced the revolution?
Chapter 5
ReplyDeleteShirky states, “Knowledge is the most combinable thing we humans have, but taking advantage of it requires special conditions. According to Dominique Foray these conditions include the size of the community, the cost of sharing that knowledge, the clarity of what gets shared and the cultural norms of the recipients. With the creation of the internet and sites like Wikipedia, the cost of sharing information has plummeted while the clarity and number of people reached has grown exponentially. This leaves the cultural norms of the people involved in sharing to decide if the information will become knowledge or just Lolcats.
Ryerson University student Christopher Avenir faced possible expulsion after the University discovered he was the administrator of a chemistry study group. The school claimed Avenir was sharing student work while he maintained it was simply an online study group. With the rise of social media, study groups that have in the past always consisted of small groups of people clustered around a table, can now expand too much larger numbers. Shirky says that with social media challenging cultural assumptions society must be open to redefining those assumptions.
PatientsLikeMe.com, a website which allows patients to share information about their illnesses, thrives through openness of its users, who support the sites openness policy. This sharing of traditionally private information has created a wealth of knowledge that would have been previously unavailable to the public. This demonstrates the potential strength of the open-source sharing that Shirky hopes will be able to harness the cognitive surplus to produce civic value.
Question: How should we govern these open sources to make sure they continue to utilize our cognitive surplus to benefit the public?
Chapter 6
All groups have an emotional component to them; the emotional connection between members is often a group’s biggest strength. The challenge according to Shirky is to find the balance between being effective as a group while still satisfying the individuals in the group. This balance is important, as groups often will feature emotionally satisfying, intellectually limiting behaviors that doesn’t capitalize on their surplus.
Shirky states that there are four main ways that people share their cognitive surplus with the online community, personal, communal, public, and civic sharing. Personal sharing involves non-coordinated individuals and generally is for personal entertainment. Communal sharing involves a group of collaborators, and usually more closed source setup. Public again involves a group of collaborators though this groups is trying to create a public resource. Civic sharing involves a group that is trying to transform society. Shirky argues that public and civic sharing are the best uses for our cognitive surplus as those types of sharing create a benefit even for non-participants, whereas personal and communal don’t include non-participants.
Shirky argues that the fun sharing aspect of the internet is alive and well and will stay that way. He believes that the next evolutionary step in harnessing our cognitive surplus will involve creating an online atmosphere that encourages sharing intellect and knowledge among the public.
Question: When a group is beginning what should they do to make sure they don’t fall into the trap of only satisfying the emotional needs of the group?
Chapter 7
ReplyDeletePeople in the past have always looked to use up their free time rather than utilize it. With the popularity of the internet and the creation of social media, people now have the means to easily connect with others all across the world. With sharing so prevalent, Shirky argues that the next step is motivation, figuring out how to get people to engage with others to productively use their cognitive surplus.
One of the keys of using our cognitive surplus involves finding the right group size with which to create a new culture. It is this redefining of culture that will allow the public to utilize Web 2.0 in the ways that Shirky defines in this book. A group that is too big to fully focus but is too small to be accepted is the right group size to create new cultural norms. Shirky says that this medium group size will allow the cultural norms to transfer to the larger community as the group grows.
In the end of the chapter Shirky tackles the question of how new medias should be integrated into society. Shirky lays out three different scenarios but ultimately supports the idea of “As much chaos as we can stand.” This scenario would allow revolutionaries try anything they like with a new technology without regard for social norms. Shirky argues that this is the best way to integrate because change can only be created from what the public can imagine. Only by allowing these revolutionaries to try many different approaches can we figure out what the public will be able to handle.
Question: All these theories and ideas are based on Web 2.0, what challenges do you see facing our cognitive surplus when Web 3.0 becomes prevalent?
A more recent social media site is PatientsLikeMe.com. It enables people of a variety of diseases to discuss their illness and give words of encouragement. All of the website is monitored to ensure patients privacy. If more social media websites were monitored more closely, such as this one, then people would feel safer, and maybe willing to engage more on the web.
ReplyDeleteShirky discusses that using the internet is an acceptable way to use our free time. However, if people didn't use it to log on to facebook and complain about their days work, and used it to for something productive, maybe posting an article about brain function from the NYT instead. The key word being productive.
In connecting with being productive, Shirky thinks that the availability of the web should be taken advantage of and used for more intellectual use. When people start sharing to heighten awareness and increase knowledge, then a revolution will occur.
Question: What do you think it will take to encourage more people to share to increase knowledge, in terms of a social media website?
On page 135 of Cognitive Surplus, Shirky notes that “People’s behaviour toward one another isn’t fully describe by the market, because market transactions cover only a small part of human behaviour” when discussing the experiment with the Haifa daycare centers. I believe this to remarkable because it points out that, although incredibly sophisticated and tied into innumerable facets of modern life, “the market” is still overwhelmingly susceptible to the actions and behavioural patterns of humans. The market can react, the market can even sometimes anticipate what people will do in that brief moment before their actions come to fruition, but it is still relatively unable to predict the actions of groups of people acting collectively.
ReplyDeleteAnd here, is where we enter into the realm of combinability, that quick-silver communication that occurs not just in the presence of knowledge, but in the cross-pollination of an idea across different perspectives, frameworks, and personalities. As Shirky says “Combinability makes knowing something different from having something” on page 139. This is one of the defining aspects of Web 2.0. It is through the cross-pollination of ideas, the concrete understanding of the nature of the ideas as it is cross-pollinated, and the differing (sometimes novel) implementation of the newly reformed concept that lies at the core of combinability within a community or movement.
“Knowledge in such communities often changes, but cultural commitment to the work must remain in place throughout the group’s life span.” This is ultimately what makes the combinability of ideas and perspectives work. Normally at this point I would talk about the nature of a group existing together but I’m feeling a bit harried today and thing have gone awry, so instead I’ll entertain you with an actual story: I wish this statement by Shirky could be required reading for every single member of Occupy.
DeleteThough Occupy has grown to become a huge global movement that has, for the first time in recent memory, brought about the specter of real revolution and shown it to the ghost-white face of the repressive dogma of capitalism. There are tremendous difficulties in organizing such people together. Knowledge changes on a daily basis. We are sometimes changing that knowledge, or our understanding of it, on a minute to minute basis (all the more accelerated by our twitter accounts and facebook feeds); yet we are also hanging on with white skin-cracked knuckles because we genuinely do not know where the next 12 months, 12 weeks, or sometimes even 12 minutes will lead us as we go hurtling down the rickety, and increasingly shaky roller coaster of history as we know it.
The commitment to the cultural work of Occupy, not just the business of it, is absolutely critical. Though we can claim to be all on the same team, we can not deny the fact that we inherently arrive from a panoply of differing avenues at this particular site of intersection. We’ve all gotten here by our own paths, but now that we’re here, it would suit us well to recognize the not-so-dissimilar reasons that we decided to venture beyond our doors. We stand in together in recognition of a great opportunity. But, as the bespectacled Shirky once again re-appears before us with the mirror, he reminds us that an opportunity seen is not an opportunity understood: “the bigger the opportunity offered by new tools, the less completely anyone can extrapolate the future from the previous society.”
So, here lies the question for Shirky as we increasingly embrace more and better tools in increasingly novel and unexpected ways, what steps can we take as movement builders and organizers to ensure that we optimize our use of emerging technologies without losing sight of that cultural commitment that has been so critical thus far?
I have a habit of asking long questions. Here’s a short version. How do we use all this stuff effectively without losing sight of what why we’re doing it in the first place?
1. The addition of a fine for day care tardiness made the problem worse. The fine added a small financial cost but removed the emotional cost of guilt. The fine turned what was a human relationship into a purely economic one.
ReplyDelete2. The best working groups share deeply held beliefs that keep them focused on achieving goals. The early scientists believed in open information and a quicker pursuit of knowledge which allowed them to move forward quicker. The danger of a group is that positive emotional experiences can create a sense of complacency.
3. Civic vs. Communal: Communal groups create value for their members while Civic groups create benefits for society as a whole.
Q. Will the increasingly participatory media culture lead to more participatory forms of business and government such as participatory budgeting and worker/consumer cooperatives.