Take Aways
What I take away from Clay Shirky’s TED Talk is that there are multiple paths for media abundance and that both are a form of creativity. He brought up the examples of LOL Cats and Ushahidi, which is a data mapping website, and compared their use to society. He illustrated civic and communal media abundance. Communal compares to when there are little clicks where the information is relevant. Civic is created by a community but can be enjoyed by a bigger group. What distinguishes something from nothing is also a little tidbit that I thought was very interesting. This implies that it is better to do something seemingly meaningless is better than doing nothing at all. This I was kind of intrigued at because in AWNM Pink didn’t even mention that you may not even think that your addition is not worthy to the world.
Application to You and to Education
These ideas are applied to education because he compares the value of communal information and civic information. In education there needs to be more civic information in my mind because if there is a focus on the communal then everything that us as students learn would only be applicable in education and its own little “community”. This most affects students because when they leave school to continue to college or start a career they need to be able to adapt to the real world and not be accustomed to sharing information inside a little community. Students will also need to be able to distinguish between the beneficial creativity and the unbeneficial (LOL Cats). Also affecting us is the fact that there is an abundance of information out there and no one person can harvest it. This is already taking place in our learning today, for research there is no way anyone could pull together all of the information straight from the sources; they always need to use a middle man like a textbook or a website. This is an example of Clay’s Civic information.
Speaking/Presenting techniques
Clay Shirky in my opinion had the weakest try at humor of all of the TED talks I have watched so far. He did however get his point across effectively and simply. He tried to incorporate humor into his speech but he made it too obvious and made it look like he was going out of his way to try to please the audience. But he was straight to the point otherwise and I was able to easily understand what his bottom line. For speaking techniques he talked slowly and paused while he was presenting his slides. This pausing with the slides was slightly awkward and hindered the forward movement of his talk. He did well outlining his plan though with three main sections. The first being specific stories.
Clay brings up the idea of cognitive overflow. This is the idea that there is too much information in the world and no one can keep track of all of it. This makes me ask myself, “will there ever be an instance when the world misses information because it just gets overwhelmed?” Would there ever be raw information that just gets lost in the masses of overload, and does this already happen? With all this information it sounds like it would be easily for some information to just be forgotten or overlooked by the whole of society. And a look into the future will there be any way to fully automize the spread of information. Would automation make more people more places be able to do more with their thoughts? Or would automation separate ideas from their origin and distort them?
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