Clay Shirky TED Talk

Clay Shirky's TED Talk on cognitive surplus was pretty interesting, but brought up some questions in my mind. Shirky talked about how easy it is to access information and how this easy access to information can change the world. He used Ushahidi, a software developed by a couple of Kenyan citizens to monitor corruption in elections, to explain all of the upside to his cognitive surplus. A lady in Kenya simply decided to track all of the corruption in one of her government's elections, but realized that she could not track all of the information if she read new information all day. A couple of software engineers though told the woman that they could pool information from a variety of sources and share this pool with the world. This website worked and the software has expanded to many applications such as tracking snow accumulation in Washington D.C. The upside to this is that information is open to everyone in the world and can easily be spread, all of this with a bunch of volunteers.

Shirky is trying to show how great cognitive surplus is and trying to get people to expand its use. I agree with him that cognitive surplus is great at the point it is and has the potential for maybe a little bit of expansion. Although I don't think that cognitive surplus can expand all that much because there are so many jobs that are dependent on supplying information to people. These volunteers only volunteer to contribute to the source of cognitive surplus because they have another source of income and have an income. But people will not contribute their skills to the site of cognitive surplus if they have no other source of income. For example, the head mechanic at a Midas might contribute information to a do-it-yourself website, but when everyone does the work themselves and he is forced out of the job that mechanic won't be overly eager to contribute more to that website.

Plus, just think how easy this information would be to exploit. Cyber terrorists try to find sources of dependency to take down and mess up. If we are fully reliant on open source information and it is truly open source, it would be pretty simple to take down the system and put our society into chaos.

I agree with Clay Shirky in the regard that cognitive surplus is great, easy to access information is a nice luxury. I think though it has gone far enough, and that it really does not have much potential to expand.