Sunday, March 13, 2011

clay shirky

just finished his most brilliant Cognitive Surplus.
message to self - don't ever think the TED or interview is enough. i went months off the ted, silly me.



















Listen to/notice how kids learn..
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.
                                                                                              -Chad Sansing

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.

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.

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.


Maybe asking them to "show" what they are doing is getting in the way of them being able to get lost in their learning.  

two competing goals:  
1) Letting individuals learn what and how they want in a safe, open environment.  
2)Asking them to prove to you that they are doing something that matters .
#2 compromises the trust vital to #1


Via Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus:
Blanket freedom increases experimentation and so decreases quality.
But it creates the stuff we will end up prizing.


People asking
Where do people find the time?
aren’t usually looking for the answer;
the question is rhetorical
and indicates that the speaker thinks certain activities are stupid.
to participate is to act as if your presence matters 
 p. 99 - our beliefs about human nature were so lousy
p. 103 - people who are part of a network where they get better at something they love, tend to stay

p. 54 media is the connective tissue to society

p. 76 you lose intrinsic by presence of predictable extrinsic
p. 79: verbal feedback seems like it should be just another extrinsic reward, like money. when it is genuine, though, and comes from someone the recipient respects, it becomes an intrinsic reward, because it relies on a sense of connectedness
p. 88 (roger martin-ish) people wh care passionately about something that seems unimportant to the rest of us are easy to mock.
p. 92: within the community, purity of motivation inside the community matters more than legality of action outside it  jkrowling

p. 95: if you only pretend to offer free space... while actually slotting people into a scripted experience, they may well revolt.

p. 118: when we want something to happen, and it's more complex than on person can accomplish alone, we need a group to do it.
we've experienced 2 ways to do this: private sector - the world of the firm, how most cars are built; and public sector - the world of government and nonprofit, how most roads are built.
a third way: social production, world of friends and family, how most picnics happen

lahori youths - responsible citizens - positive deviance - trash pick up
social production is not a panacea,, it's just an alternative
p. 132 - daycare with fine for late pick up, lateness increased - inducing parents to see the day-care workers as participants in a market transaction rather than as people whose needs had to be respected - parents figured now they were paying for the inconvenience so heart tug didn't matter

p. 135:
how we treat one another matters, and not just in a "it's nice to be nice" kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others. 

p. 138: 
the invisible college had one single advantage over the alchemists... they had each other.

start p. 17 6 - in a free culture, you get what you celebrate
the more we want to do so at the civic end (personal, communal, public, civic) the more we have to bind ourselves to one another to achieve (and celebrate) shared goals. 
neither perfect individual freedom nor perfect social control is optimal. manage the tension between individual freedom and social value.

governance: ways of discouraging or preventing people from wrecking either the process or the product of the group 
on ebay -  ultimately members' reputations mattered enough to keep fraud to a minimum. incentive not just to behave well but to be seen as behaving well.
p. 179: creativity at the personal/communal lend of the spectrum requires little of that sort of governance to survive, but the more a group wants to take on hard public or civic problems, the great the internal threats of distraction or dissipation are and the stronger the norms of governance need to be.

p. 186: if we want to create new forms of civic value, we need to improve the ability fo small groups to try radical things,
some i wrote in pesce

p. 205: the task isn't just to get something done, but to create an environment in which people want to do it.
p. 206: david weinberger, clairty is violence, groups tolerate governance, which is by definition a set of restrictions, only after enough value has accumulated to make the burden worthwhile. since that value builds up on ly over time, the burden of the rules has to follow, not lead.
tension between rules and design (freedom and structure)

single greatest predictor of how much value we get out of our cognitive surplus is how much we allow and encourage one antoerh to experiment, because the only group that can try everything is everybody.
let the radicals experiment - as much chaos as you can stand

p. 212
what matters most now is our imaginations. 
the worlds people and the connectoins among us provide the raw material for cognitive surplus
media that is targeted at you but doesn't include you might not be worth sitting still for (4 yr old - where's the mouse) - participation
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