Clay Shirky

When Clay Shirky talks about the Kenyan women’s website going global my mind automatically thinks about Egypt’s recent struggles over freedom.  Both the women and Egypt’s people presented their ideas through technology. The Kenyan women used a blog account and Egyptians used twitter, facebook, and other online sources. The website, Ushahidi, was later created by the two men helping the Kenyan women’s blog account.  If Ushahidi was used in Egypt to help protesters congregate would the crusade for freedom been more organized? Ushahidi creates a map where all of the commenter’s information is organized and tracked. 

Ushahidi could be used in the education system. If each school has a website like Ushahidi, then each classroom is a different “city”. The classrooms information will hold what that class did that day, homework, and any other necessary information the children learned during class. Different schools could look at other’s Ushahidi websites and get ideas for their students. Opening the knowledge and information of each school to the world could create a new way of learning.

Shirky also talked about civic and communal value and how if we change the world based off of money the change will not survive. But, if the change is based off of feeling the whole world with contribute to their civic duty.  Civic value helps humanity as a whole; on contrast communal value only helps the people interested. Ushahidi has civic value; it helped the people interested and went worldwide and helped humanity as a whole. Now if we take Ushahidi and expand it even further into education, the civic value of Ushahidi will expand making a stable change in humanity.

Shirky’s stories of cognitive surplus also reminded me of the book we just read, Little Brother. In Little Brother, the main character’s knowledge of technology helps him change his world. Cognitive surplus has helped the Kenyan women change her world and could possibly help the rest of the world to change.

In Drive by Daniel Pink, he talks about the motivations of people and how people perform better when they do something just because they like to and not because they are being paid. If each person contributes their free time and help with a large project, our workforce will change. This free time will use that natural motivation that Pink talks about to cognitive surplus. But, how much free time do we really have? Shirky talks about having trillions of hours of free time. I personally do not know where all this free time is and does this free time include homework or extra work from one’s job? I want to know more, so I emailed Clay Shirky. He has not emailed back, but if/when he does I will post his response.