Reflection: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

Our next book to reflect on is Clay Shirky’s Cognative Surplus (2010).  Having received my undergraduate degree in Psychology, I found this book to be very fascinating to read.  Many of the “norms” we expect individuals and society to follow in today’s day and age, we see changed throughout this book.  Shirky credits the opportunities that are offered to all of us on a daily basis as being the reason behind these changes. 

The first situation that interested me was the amount of TV being watched by individuals.  What do people do with their free time? Watch TV.  However, Shirky has found that today there are groups of young people who are watching less TV than their parents.  “Young populations with access to fast, interactive media are shifting their behavior away from media that presupposes pure consumption “(pg. 11).  In my opinion, there really isn’t much of a difference between spending time staring at a computer screen watching YouTube videos or sitting on the couch watching TV.  However, Shirky points out one big difference.  While I am quietly sitting on my couch conversing with no one, teens are online with the “opportunities to comment on materials, to share it with friends, to label, rate, or rank  it, and of course, to discuss it with other viewers around the world” (pg. 11). At this point in my life, I don’t have kids but I have thought about the use of the internet by children or young adults and what I will decide when I am hopefully a parent some day.  I have always been anti-internet for kids and teens because all we hear about on the news are sex offenders seeking out children or bulling happening by instant messaging or Facebook.   You never hear about the good that the internet can bring to the development of young children and you don’t think about the great array of knowledge you are keeping your children from if they are not able to explore it.  I am starting to consider the drawbacks of not allowing my children to use the internet.  Will I be setting my children back by not allowing them to participate and grow from cognitive surplus? 

When Shirky speaks about cognitive surplus, he talks about projects such as Ushahidi and Wikipedia.  What projects like these did was allow people to satisfy their want to create and to share.  Although it has obviously been a success and is very evident when you look at things such as Facebook and Wikipedia, I find myself not falling into this category of people.  I have many intrinsic passions that I enjoy but do not have a need to share it with the world as many people do.  Maybe it is just the personality type that I am, however, am I at a disadvantage as more and more of these types of project come to existence?  I think that participation in these types of resources is on a wide spectrum, ranging from individuals who use them daily, adding comments, rating, ranking, liking, etc.  all the way to individuals who use them only a few times a month to look up information and not really adding to its content.  I find myself somewhere in the middle. 

As I read about Shirky’s thoughts on opportunity, my thoughts on if I will allow my children to use the internet and how I use it myself, have changes.  He spoke about people operating as peers without someone who is managing them.  “This increase in our ability to create things together, to pool our free time and particular talents into something useful, is one of the great new opportunities of the age, one that changes the behavior of people who take advantage of it”(pg. 119). If someone were to ask me to describe my work style, I would say that I am a team player.  After reading this sentence, I realized that the internet is a new tool to allow us to all work as team players.  Not only with the people that we share and office space with, but also with people that work thousands of miles away from us.  At our university, civic engagement and civility has become a huge part of our everyday work life.  We are asked to attend workshops on these areas and take what we have learned and incorporate it into our everyday lives.  The internet is a great way to better understand others perspectives and to realize that our way of thinking is not always the only way.  There are so many talented people in this world and we do not all live within 45 miles of one another.  At what other time in history, were people ever able to communicate as freely and as globally as we have to ability to do today?  Because of that, I truly do believe that I am to a disadvantage if I don’t use the tools that we are so lucky to have at our fingertips today.

As I wrap this up, I know I say this often, but I can’t help but think about the children I hope to have one day and how different the wor;d they grow up in will be compared to mine.  The best thing I can do is be open minded to the changes that come up and to not just sit back and stay in my ways.  It is to all of our advantages to explore the options that are put before us because that will help us grow.   Where would we be today if we didn’t take Gutenberg’s printing press invention and run with the idea of spreading knowledge as far as we can take it?  

Reflection - The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr is a book about the effects of technology and the internet on society both intellectually and culturally.  In this paper, I will reflect on this reading and contribute my thoughts around the ideas that Carr has brought up in his book.

                I can still remember the very first time I used a computer.  For many people my age, the story may be similar.  I was in 3^rd or maybe 4^th grade when my teacher introduced Oregon Trail for social studies class.  That was the very first time that technology was incorporated into my education.  It only grew from there as teachers began to require typed papers, videos were shown in relation to what we were learning, and researching topics could be done by using “Ask Jeeves”.  Don’t get me wrong, I have spent my fair share of time in the library, researching topics by digging into the multiple shelves and tracking down that one book based on a grouping of numbers and letters.  However, I have been part of a generation that has been introduced year after year to new ways of researching topics and information. 

There has been quite a change in how information is being absorbed since the start of the internet.  In chapter one, Carr talks about the way he read books.  Often times spending many hours immersing himself in books and absorbing long articles.  He goes on to talk about an interview with Bruce Friedman about how the internet has changes that way of reading.  On page 7, he mentions, “His (Friedman) thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online.”  This is something I relate to.  Reading articles and books was something I enjoyed doing when I was younger, but as articles on the internet have become more readily available including smaller articles with more pertinent and to-the-point information, I find it harder and harder to sit down and read an entire book, word for word.  This has benefits and drawbacks.  Benefits include being able to learn more about a topic in a smaller amount of time, the ability to research and be a “skilled hunter” (pg 9) to find many different sources which can include multiple perspectives from others, however, are we truly learning anything if we are not spending the time to dig into it further and completely understand a topic, are we challenging ourselves if we are just skimming the topic.   The effect that the internet is causing on how information is being processed is summed up on Page 10, “Calm, focuses, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapped bursts- the faster, the better.”

Carr continues by discussing the many views that scientists and physicians had on how the brain relays information and how it relates to us as children all the way through adulthood.  The brain is believed to be made of nerve cells or neurons with a central core that carries a function and use axons to communicate with one another by transmitting neurotransmitters across a synapse to the dendrites of another neuron.  It is “the thousands of billions of synapses inside our skulls tie our neurons together into a dense mesh of circuits that, in ways that are still far from understood, give rise to what we think, how we feel and who we are” (pg 20).  The difference that physicians and scientists couldn’t agree on was if neurons could grow and change throughout your life or if they stayed the same as when you were a child.  My personal thought on this, I came to understand, when Carr spoke about those with mental illnesses or brain injury.  If our brains could not change or grow, there would be no hope for either to recover.  It was interesting to read about the experiment done at the University of Wisconsin Madison by Michael Merzenich.  Although I am a strong believe in animal rights and do not believe it was humane for a scientist to cut holes in a monkey’s skull, the understanding we received about how the brain can reorganize itself after nerves have been severed or limbs have been lost, was a huge break though.  It is also reassuring to know that there is hope for mental illness and brain injury patients.  I do believe that our brain is always creating new neurons that help us feel and become who we are.  However, I don’t think we lose many neurons along the way either.  I think that our neurons are always growing just like the rest of our body.  For example, I have fair skin and red hair.  I have always had fair skin and red hair, however, my skin and hair now is not the same skin and hair that I had when I was 5 but it still has the same characteristics.  I didn’t, along the way, one day wake up with tan skin and brown hair. The same for neurons, what I think and what I feel may change, but I never completely forget who I was or how I felt along the way.  However, memories are forgotten which shows me that it is possible to lose some neurons along the way also.

Carr talks about the argument between technological determinism and instrumentalism.  Determinism believes that what happens is out of the control of humans.  Instrumentalism believes that humans are in control of the instruments that are invented.  Both arguments are easy to see when you think about different technologies.  Something may have been invented because society had a need for it and it is the humans choice as to what is being used, however, determinist would say that humans have no control over the “path and pace of technological progress” (pg 47).   Although this is an argument that will never be resolved, it is evident that technology changes the path that our world takes.  You can see this simply by reading history books or even thinking back to your own childhood and the advances that have been made that have changed your own world. 

Google is yet another tool that has changed us as we know it.  Be honest, who hasn’t googled their own name to find what may be out there?  But what we don’t always see so readily is the impact it is making on society and how it is shaping our word.  Efficiency has always been important, no matter what point in history and also today. It’s what often times drives invention and technological advances.  But at what point is it all too much?  It reminds me of the commercials out there today where someone will ask a simple question and the other person begins to babble on about different answers much like what you read when you type in a google search, information overload.  In order to find what you are looking for, you scan and skim over words which are why we no longer have the patients to sit down and read a whole book any longer.  It’s a vicious cycle that in my opinion will never be reversed.  That is the way technology has changed our world and will continue to change us as we go. 

Every job has its tools and every generation has its inventions that have changed life as we knew it at that time.  I feel that we can’t dwell on the past and how things were once done. We need to be as flexible as the neurons in our brains.  We can always look back to learn from the past but we also need to be flexible about the future.  If we are conscious of how technological advancements can affect society either negatively or positively, we will be successful on improving our world for the future.