Clay Shirky spoke at Cannes in June as part of a TED Talk, in which he expanded on the concept of ‘cognitive surplus’. Shirky explained the power of people’s collective intelligence, creativity, and efforts – or cognitive surplus – and its ability to benefit the greater, societal good. There were a few ideas and points that caught our attention from Shirky’s perspective:
- The example of Ushahidi.com – a free, open and crowd-sourced crisis management information platform that was born in Kenya during the disputed presidential election of 2007 (we discussed it a while back). A Kenyan pundit’s personal blog and endeavor to share information during a government-mandated media blackout was supported – and ultimately expanded – by other individuals and organizations. During the past 3 years, what started as an individual blog evolved into a global, collaborative crisis-management platform that has been utilized to communicate and visualize data aggregated from cell phones, SMS, and blog reports – covering the earthquake in Haiti and even the current oil spill.
- Deployment and collaboration of this fast-spreading nature and global scale would not have been possible without digital media tools and human generosity
- Cognitive Surplus thus consists of 1) free time and talents and 2) digital media tools that allow broad-reach sharing of the fruits of said free time and talents
- Some of the results of cognitive surplus may be humorous and entertaining to a particular community of participants (i.e., lolcats), while others will be valuable to a greater, societal good (i.e. Ushahidi.com); while the common denominating factor is that they are the result of people’s intrinsic desire to share, what differentiates them is who receives value from the collaboration – a limited audience of participants, or a broader society
- This later result of cognitive surplus is design for generosity
- To understand what motivates people, we need to identify and understand social constraints (those that impact others) vs. contractual (i.e., economic) constraints – social constraints encourage a more generous culture
- How to encourage cognitive surplus to direct efforts towards design for generosity? Free cultures get what they celebrate, support and reward; we (businesses, governments, individuals) therefore need to reward those that are using cognitive surplus to create civic value
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