Cognitive Surplus began by challenging my lifestyle.
I used to take pride in how little television I watched, until the first chapter shocked me enough to challenge my thinking.
I don’t need it at all, it is not my ‘part-time job’ and there are greater things I can do with my life.
Cognitive Surplus begins by highlighting research showing that the three most time consuming activities in our lives are sleep, work and watching TV.
‘Someone born in 1960’s has already watched fifty thousand hours of television’.
We have entered an age where you can create change in the world and being an amateur can actually be a good thing (amateur derives from love – to do something for the love of it).
Passionate amateurs have created change beyond what would have been possible 20 years ago in both scale and timeframe. An example of this is PatientsLikeMe a US website where people can share their experience of living with medical conditions.
People share their stories of illness and support each other. However the site also delivers some unplanned benefits. On PatientsLikeMe People discuss current clinical trials and others reading these threads uncover experimental and potentially life saving treatments they may otherwise have never discovered. In the past it would have been incredibly challenging to get enough patients to sign up to a clinical trial for rare medical conditions but now the word spreads quickly due to the considerable number of people on the site enabling more accurate findings on treatment effectiveness.
Essentially social media and open source technology can save lives.
Clay Shirky’s book uses many case studies to talk about how collaboration online can help the whole knowledge of humanity become more valuable than the sum of its parts. As well as drawing upon well-known examples such as Wikipedia it touches on other less well know sites. Ushahidi, a project created in Kenya overtook short wave radio as a way to track outbreaks of violence as by collating reports online and via text message to create an accurate alert system.
In an era of depressing and violent media stories this book left me feeling hopeful for the future of humanity. Well worth a read.
Thanks so much as always Pauline. I will be back next week, and in the meantime, feel free to get in contact with any suggestions for new book reviews.
About Pauline Tarrant:
Pauline has a passion for people performance and spent her entire working life helping organisations, teams and individuals perform at their best. Her expertise in the HR technology space enables Pauline Tarrant Consulting to operate as a trusted partner to the HR team to explore how to get the best from existing technology and explore new solutions that offer best-fit improvements to their business.
