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Live from San Fran » Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 conference: Cognitive surplus

Back to WebMission08 Written on 29-Apr-2008 by soniak

One of the highlights of the trip for me: a very smart and engaging talk from Clay Shirky at the Web2.0 conference.

I must admit I only heard about Clay Shirky and his new book Here Comes Everybody a few weeks ago in London, while it is apparently already all the crave in San Fran, in the lineage of other fundamental social media books such as The Long Tail or the Tipping Point.

I just bought the book so will talk more about it after I finish it, however I think the subject of Shirky's talk at Web2.0 was slightly different. In a very entertaining way he laid out his theory of the "cognitive surplus": participative media such as blogging, wikipedia, ratings, reviews, etc are the result of people shifting their cognitive surplus time from watching TV to doing something more interactive. Therefore participative media are here to stay and users expectations vis-a-vis entertainment and media are shifting from just Consume to Consume, Produce and Share.

The outline of the speech is on Shirky's blog and the video of the full speech is below. I highly recommend watching it, they guy has a good caustic humor too!

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Tags: web2.0,conference,shirky

Comments

written on 30-Apr-2008

faridl says:

I agree with his view. It was made possible by technology improvements (being participative with rss and blogs is far easier than building your own html site), greater affordability (bandwidth and storage are cheaper than chips now) and also a change in how people interact with the TV, thanks for example to the rise of video games as a major media industry. People (now just teens, Xbox owners are 25yrs old on average) now expect to be active in front of their TV. The rise of devices such as the eeePC or the iPhone should further develop the trend by making it easier to remain connected from anywhere without any (major) sacrifice
written on 30-Apr-2008

kylie says:

Was a good listen. I liked his style of presenting his ideas.

I hadn't analyzed my shift from having a TV to not having one for the last year. Now instead of turning on the tele I reach for the laptop. I had noble notions of why I stopped watching TV but perhaps TV wasn't 'active' enough for me!

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Live from San Fran » Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 conference: Cognitive surplus

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