Initially, I expected this TED talk to be a bit... boring. I only assumed this because of the title, specifically the words 'cognitive surplus'. Although I came into listening to the talk with low expectations, it led me to be rather resonant on the topic discussed. Cognitive Surplus is the ability of people in the world to volunteer their time and talents to create and collaborate on different projects. According to Shirky, people don't enjoy being couch potatoes, they are just because it is an opportunity. People would rather be out creating and sharing ideas. He used examples such as a Kenyan lawyer who, in 2007 after a disputed politic outcome, began blogging about the situation, keeping people updated on the latest news from the situation. When her blogging became so widely read that she couldn't handle it alone, two programmers volunteered to help her out and hence, Ushahidi was born. Ushahidi is a program which is used to spread information to the public by crisis mapping. Governments in the US, Mexico, Haiti, and many other countries use the program for many different reasons including snow plow mapping after only 3 years. Another example Shirky used was an experiment conducted within a preschool in the Middle East. in preschools everywhere, teachers struggle with late parents who just cannot get their children on time and it wastes the teacher's time. In one preschool, the teachers began charging a fee for when parents came late, while in the other preschool, the teachers left the school policy as usual without a late fee. In the school with the late fee, the number and frequency of late parents increased greatly and that number remained high even after the late fee was lifted. the other 'control' classroom's late rate stayed consistent throughout. Now why did the results turn out this way? It is because of the compassion and guilt people felt throughout the experiment. When the parents had to pay a fine for being late, they felt they were compensating the teachers enough that they could be more careless about the teacher's time and that the money would replace the guilt they would have felt otherwise. This displays how the feeling of emotional guilt has a bigger impact on people than monetary guilt does because they feel like repaying someone emotionally is much tougher than it may be to pay someone money to make the guilt go away. Many people encounter this everyday in situations like donating to cancer funds or the Dumb Friends' League, etc. When people felt guilty about not doing anything to help those who really need it, many choose to pay money over volunteering to make up for their guilt. Although donations are needed in most cases, it is more personal and compassionate to donate one's time with kids or dogs in need. All this cognitive surplus (volunteering, creating. and developing) is all in support of people staying compassionate and not losing intrinsic value, which is so easy to do in times when you don't even have to talk to people face to face if you don't want to. Technology removes emotional ties from relationships which can result in mindless drone relationships that mean nothing. Shirky presents this information in his own way by using arm/hand movements, although he shows little facial emotion compared to other speakers we have seen, his use of interesting and relatable quotes, and the employment of his sly humor, which one would only recognize if one were listening.
No comments:
Post a Comment