Clay Shirky: Are Lolcats a Sign of Human Progress?

Complete Premium video at: http://fora.tv/conference/wired_business_conference_2010

Clay Shirky explains how widespread education coupled with 21st-century technology has enabled what he terms "cognitive surplus," or the potential for large and cumulative creative endeavors. He argues that while it is responsible for inanity like Lolcats, "doing something is different from doing nothing."

To view more highlights from the Wired Business Conference 2010 series, visit http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=527FFBDE013F4390

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Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age featuring Clay Shirky, Author; Adjunct Professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program - NYU.

Disruption happens. A technology breakthrough. A shift in consumer demand. A rise, or fall, in a critical market. Any of these can rewrite the future of a company -- or a whole industry. If you haven't faced this moment, you will soon. It's time to change the way you run your business. Now what?

How you decide to respond is what separates the leaders from the left behind. Today's smartest executives know that disruption is constant and inevitable. They've learned to absorb the shockwave that change brings, and can use that energy to transform their companies and their careers.

At the second WIRED Business Conference, presented in partnership with MDC Partners, you'll hear from industry leaders on how to respond to change, and how to use it to your advantage. Through one-on-one conversations between speakers and Wired editors and interaction with the speakers, you'll see how disruption is transforming the way smart organizations make decisions, keeping them on a steady path to growth. - WIRED

Clay Shirky lectures, writes and consults on the social and economic effects of the Internet. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, Web services, and wireless networks -- alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. At NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program he teaches how networks shape culture and vice-versa. In one course, Shirky examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and how social software may be redesigned to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.

Shirky has written extensively about the Internet since 1996, regularly appearing in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and WIRED. His books include Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. The Library of Congress and the BBC are among his clients.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• LOLcats
• cheezburger
• internet
• web
• culture
• meme
• creativity
• art
• information
• tech
• community
• fora.tv
• foratv
• fora
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• clay
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[ShaedeReshka]

can i haz human progres?

[1HumanKind]

@Phelan666

did you just post that on the 'net with your computer, powered by electricity in your centrally heated home, at an age you would never have reached a few decades ago? Did you risk your life to hunt your lunch?

Although I do question the value of that progress when the level of ignorance you possess is tolerated.

As for man made illusions; I know your sphincter must feel stretched out now but maybe the sky daddy will help you huh?

[dbaird31919]

Poo poo

[TraderEddy]

@oninoshiko Wikipedia defacement is counter-progress because it removing an aspect of progress. Now creating a wiki page about non-sense, is progress. Lorenzo Von Matterhorn is a great illustration of that.

As for propaganda, it is progress, because now you are creating images, and altering thoughts. Yet, you've progressed because you've added to someone's spectrum of knowledge and have deepened the information they can draw from. So it is progressive, but it is destructive progress.

[TheBSG]

Hey look the first time I've wanted to pay for content in years.

[ReaXce]

pjuny hoomian i haz cheezburger

- no progres....

[blobbertopper]

i CAN has human progress

[oninoshiko]

Mr. Shirky makes the intrinsic assumption that "involvement" is better then not being involved. I think this assumption is not a safe one. Every "wikipedia defacement" is involvement, is that progress? When hate groups post their propaganda, that is "involvement," but is is progress?

[iTzEvrywhere]

@jacobbocanegra yea but everyone likes cats with funny messages.

[iTzEvrywhere]

@LegendaryDie It's always like this, every other category is at least 100 times as much.

[LegendaryDie]

@iTzEvrywhere It might be for today only, which, depending on the timezone YouTube uses, may have been reset only a few hours ago. Not really sure how it works.