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Scoop.it!
Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink have led eerily parallel lives. Both grew up in Midwest university towns in the 1970s, where they spent their formative years watching television after school and at night. 
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Scoop.it!
Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink have led eerily parallel lives. Both grew up in Midwest university towns in the 1970s, where they spent their formative years watching television after school and at night. Both later went to Yale (a BA in painting for Shirky, a law degree for Pink). And both eventually abandoned their chosen fields to write about technology, business, and society.
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Scoop.it!
People in the industrial world have a great deal of free time. Clay Shirky has described this free time, considered as a whole, as a vast “cognitive surplus,” and presents many efforts currently under way to use the cognitive surplus for prosocial ends. However, the cognitive surplus came to exist largely as a result of labor–saving devices that run on fossil fuels. Many problems relating to fossil fuels constrain how people can responsibly use the cognitive surplus to address environmental sustainability and other current concerns. We suggest that an excellent use of the present cognitive surplus is to help society prepare for an energy–scarce future — that is, a future that may not be able to support the existence of a cognitive surplus at the current level.
Scoop.it!
I’m a big fan of professor and writer Clay Shirky.The insights he shares about digital culture via his writings are sharp and thoughtful. I read Shirky’sHere Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizers last year and found it relevant and instructive despite its publication date of 2008. On its heels is Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Collaboraters(2010), which is accurate not only in the predictions made of how society behaves today with our abundance of time, connectivity and tech tools, but of most value was how it changed my views about MOOCs’ role in education.
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