A great and insightful speech about collaboration and the social shift it brings with it.
Let's all look for the mouse!
I've seen a lot of these tech speeches before, and they're all the same. They all are bursting with possibility and enthusiasm, and they all bored me to tears.
This one was different. Clay Skirky is a very good speaker, and even if you don't agree with his conclusions, he has some great points and he's fun to listen to. Great video.
Maslow's heirarchy of needs from "A Theory of Human Motivation" has self-actualization at the top of the pyramid, which includes creativity and problem solving. I think Clay should have pointed this out to the TV producer.
He also could've pointed out that 200+ channels on TV are nothing but crap. That's why more people are willing to spend money on going to see blockbuster films than they will on their cable bill, even after the rampant piracy on the net.
"Looking for the mouse" as a nice soundbyte is great.
If you think about it though, he's talking about a kid watching Dora the Explorer. If you're a parent you'll know that Dora regularly features a large mouse pointer clicking on things as part of the show. Eg: Dora will ask "Can you see Boots the Monkey?" and after a few seconds a giant pointer will click on him.
So the kid in question is probably looking for the mouse that drives that pointer, not thinking that because it's a screen it needs to be interactive.
Nice try, but unfortunately Mr Shirky needs to do more research :)
If anyone is curious I took notes while I watched this ... so if you are short on time and want a deeper jist w/o 30mintues:
http://timbauer.bauerfive.com/2008/05/07/clay-shirky-author-the-world-is-drunk-on-tv/
One commenter notes: "So the kid in question is probably looking for the mouse that drives that pointer, not thinking that because it's a screen it needs to be interactive."
Nice try but you missed the point even though your comment highlights it: the kid was looking for the tool of interaction.
The kid knew about interactivity -- what a mouse does -- and wanted to find the mouse -- probably to be interactive. What else does one do with a mouse? Unless you think that the kid would say "Oh, there's the mouse" and quietly sit back down and do nothing." Not any 4 year old I've known.
Do more research and see for yourself.
Insightful. Explains to me once again that technology has a lot of catching up to do as well. We are still buying TV's that are so two dimensional. There are not many places where you can interact. I guess the BBC are attempting to break the mould with BBC interactive but there is still a long way to go. Also explains well to me why i too sit in front of the TV with my laptop.
this guy is (a) stating the obvious (b) in an annoying manner. did he get paid? good 4 him.
Much as I like Mr. Shirkey's overall message, the points he tries to make to back up his message are nothing but empty glibness:
- Gin was used in England to absorb culture shock of displaced persons at the start of the Industrial Revolution: From Wikipedia, the following two entries "By 1740 the production of gin had increased to six times that of beer, and because of its cheapness it became extremely popular with the poor. Of the 15,000 drinking establishments in London, over half were gin-shops." "The Industrial Revolution was a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions in Britain." ........so we can see that gin's popularity was already well-established in England well before the Industrial Revolution, therefore it must have been serving some mysterious purposes other than cushioning the culture shock of transplanted country bumpkins.
- British social infrastructures were created because society "woke up from its gin bender": Social infrastructures are generally created when society sees - over a LONG time period - that the symptoms of neglect are more costly than paying attention to the causes in the first place. Dickens and other writers have shown that England's gin craze persisted well past the mid-1800s (see this page http://www.victorianlondon.org/entertainment/ginpalaces.htm), so nobody was waking up from any gin benders when England began a real craze of library-building in at the beginning of the 17th century (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_library). But England's Public Libraries Act 1850 did indeed set the precedent for public access to a greater number of libraries.
- Sitcoms were used as the panacea to absorb newfound free time after the industrial revolution took hold: Aw, now look, people have had time-wasters of one sort or another since ever since time was invented. New time-wasters have always found their targets; radio was one, television was an even more attractive and pervasive one. The internet has been yet another, and more will follow.
- We're now waking up from the "sitcom bender": What, into a "reality" show bender?
- The very concept of "attention surplus disorder" that he's hawking is an attractive but subjective misnomer: Fact is, people want and need to "tune out" every so often: they don't want to always have to feel "productive". What's more, his concept of productivity is seriously flawed: he sees "editing wikipedia or posting to his blog or contributing to a mailing list" as more productive than watching Gilligan's Island!
- The "Wiki Crime Map" he refers to is "someone working alone with a really cheap tool": Okay, it may be inexpensive for someone to set up a website these days. But a wiki, by definition, is never "someone working alone", and the Internet as a whole is anything but "a really cheap tool".
He understands what people think, want, and actually do. Sounds little funny at the very first time but it's true people are greedy so they want to do everything from comsuming, producing to sharing. I strongly agree with his cite that he descirice our character towards media life. However I wanted to know more specific reason why we are like what he mentioned. He just said we are still on kind of vage phase yet and that's becuase there are lots of complex things..That was not enough to get. I was waiting for having more logical and clear points though. Moreover, I think this is quite good way to promote himself and his new coming book as well. Saying "I am not going to talk about my new book" and without saying anything good about his book he made himself up. I enjoyed watching his speech.
@BenB: Your criticisms really don't hold water.
The most absurd point was when you implied that it's ridiculous to say that "editing wikipedia or posting to his blog or contributing to a mailing list" are more productive activities than watching Gilligan's Island. How can you argue that writing and editing (contributing to culture) is less productive than sitting on your arse watching a braindead sitcom rerun?
Clearly the word "productive" doesn't mean what you think it means.
I frame all human activities within the question,"What is Evolution?" My definition is "Evolution is information building on information." Based on this definition most people's activities are trivial and redundant. Profits alone are not a healthy criteria to support information building on information. What is a healthy criteria is whether or not the activity provides something novel that creates an integrated complexity.
The American Dream or any dream of power or comfort is an irrelevant goal because is does not necessarily pursue innovation. Most people are not directing their lives towards information building on information. Instead they're growing fat and domesticated on sugars and saturated fats.
It turns out that my idea of framing issues in terms of evolution is catching on. See page 32 of Scientific American Jan 2009.
Below is one example of positive evolution and integrated complexity.
Sons of Kenyan Village Build First Clinic' http://abcnews.go.com/WN/PersonOfWeek/comments?type=story&id=6763156
Picture evolution as a "tree" of ever expanding information building on information that is constantly branching and growing.
The village was compelled to give what little they had to help the two students. They did so willingly to expand towards the leading edge of information and networking. The village is the trunk of the tree. The two students are then propelled up to the highest branches of this every expanding tree of information. The integrated complexity is the acknowledgment and return of resources to the village. Just as the upper branches of the tree nourish the lower structures that support it.
The problem we often have in most social systems is that many people view evolution as a pruned tree in which they are the surviving fittest. It's very likely the Wall Street Executives who take billions, while the middle class economy that supports them are going bankrupt, think they are the fittest.
This pruned tree model is not what we see naturally occurring around us. What we see are hierarchal information processing systems "trees" that are continually growing not pruned. There is plenty of genetic evidence to support that mutations and novelty outpace the pruning of natural selection. Furthermore the problematic social systems ignore the support of the lower structures which I call the integrated complexity.
Evolution is information building of information which yields an integrated complexity. Evolution is not a pruned tree. It is the tree that keeps on growing.
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