clay shirky

great post Chad. so spot on here:
but our kids need an ocean of information into which they can dive and from which they can drink in huge, slurping gulps that look somehow vulgar or excessive to us.

i'm reading Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. i thought his TED on it was enough. silly me. there's so much i needed to hear from his book.
when he talks about the mad cow protest in Seoul, where the teenage girls took over, he quotes Mimi Ito, and i'm going to blatantly quote it all here, it's that huge:

Their participation in the protests was grounded less in the concrete conditions of their everyday lives, and more in their solidarity with a shared media fandom... Although so much of what kids are doing online may look trivial and frivolous, what they are doing is building the capacity to connect, to communicate, and ultimately, to mobilize. From Pokemon to massive political protests, what's distinctive about this historical moment and today's rising generation is not only a distinct form of media expression, but how this expression is tied to social action.

Shirky goes on to say:
Digital tools were critical to coordinating human contact and real-world activity.. when communications tools are in new hands, they take on new characteristics.
and earlier Shirky writes:
During the protests in South Korea, though, media stopped being just a source of information and became a locus of coordination as well.
The atomization of social life in the twentieth century left us so far removed from participatory culture that when it came back, we needed the phrase "participatory culture" to describe it.

Tyler - your Nietzsche quote nails it.
are we intoxicated by memory? too drunk to see what we're missing... what we're, often unintentionally, keeping from our kids?
we should detox, and fast.
the ocean is amazing.

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