Where’s the mouse. The cognitive surplus.
Last week I got through the EDGE newsletter to know about the talk given by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 Expo held in San Francisco (CA) last April 2008. In his talk titled: GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS Clay explains what he believes is the ooportunity wwe have to take advantage of the existingf Cognitive Surplus, we’ve realized it exists afteer decades of beeing passive in front of our TV sets.
The opportunity he talks about is exemplified by a girls who was watching a video on TV and after a while she jumpred in to the TV set and looked after something behind the screen, and finally she asked her dad “Where’s the mouse?”. Thus, interaction is the new paradigm of using the media.
Clay Shisrky referes all the time during his speech to the sceptical view of a journalist who still believes that the 20th century paradigm of the media will continue, and doesn’t trust clay when he states that we are facing a revolution as important as the industrial revolution.
It is worth to see Clay’s video here: http://blip.tv/play/AbTSFIa8DQ or to read the text in here: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge255.html.
His final statement is something that all the people who are working and studying in the Network Society or the Information Society would probably support:
We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.
