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Assignment 21: Reading Reflection No. 2

For this assignment, I read Clay Shirky's "Cognitive Surplus." (I really, ridiculously enjoyed it!)

1. The central theme of the book is how humanity's inherent need to socialize, share, and communicate can be harnessed via social media technology to coordinate action and discussion in an unprecedented way. This is called our cognitive surplus. Throughout the book, he cites various examples of curious human behavior that arose from the combination of humanity's basic desire to be social creatures and innovative forums for public discourse. It's a truly fascinating analysis of human behavior and how it has not been changed but given new opportunities through the Internet and social media.

2. I am taking two business courses right now as part of my outside concentration for my major. I've learned in both courses that a huge part of business is looking past what you think the reasons for consumer behavior are and trying to find the actual reasons that motivate them. This, by no coincidence, is also a huge portion of Shirky's book. In class, Professor Pryor says that entrepreneurs make a mistake when they assume consumers want their product when, in fact, they want a solution to a problem. In the same vein, Shirky says that people don't want to passively consume media, they want the opportunity to interact with media in new ways. The study of entrepreneurship involves a lot of study of human behavior, and this book was no exception.

3. The main point of this book, the power of unified effort via the Internet, is something people my age are acutely aware of. We click "Interested" on Facebook events that would've gone unnoticed in the community 10 years ago. We read lengthy discourses on interesting topics on Reddit. We participate in Instagram fitness challenges and encourage others under the appropriate hashtags. This stuff isn't new to us; we were born doing it. However, I might consider asking the class to attempt to organize an event via an unconventional media channel. In one part of the book, Shirky describes how teenage girls in Korea organized massive public protests via messaging boards on a boy band's website. Although the band had nothing to do with the protests and did not initiate the conversation, the fans merely saw an opportunity to organize on the website and seized it. This exercise might demonstrate that participants have the capacity to harness a group's cognitive surplus, even in unlikely spaces. 

4. This book said many things I already unconsciously believed to be true, but seeing it put into words made me conscious of aspects of human behavior. I suppose I suspected that social media and the Internet made humans a bit more lazy, which is partially true, but a major talking point in Shirky's book is how every innovation comes with good and bad consequences. I'm sure people thought the telephone degraded the value of face-to-face contact, which is fair, but I don't have to explain the positive value of the telephone. Similarly, there will always be people creating useless content on the Internet, but for every cat video, there is a Facebook event for a community protest. What I took away was to value the collective experience of the Internet and what it enables people to do. As someone who appreciates cat videos and community demonstrations, I love this about the time I happen to be living in and Shirky's insightful analysis of the human condition.

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