Clay Shirky launched his new book “Cognitive Surplus
” at the LSE yesterday evening (also available: podcast and video). The “Cognitive Surplus” comes from a combination of the increase in free time since the mid 1900s and the recently developed medium for coordinated action.
This follows “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together
” which is one of the seminal texts for the impact of social media on society.
As well as presenting some excellent material from his book, I found him a very engaging speaker. His main theme (amongst a fair few) was that digital communications and social media is providing opportunities for previously unmet social/psychological needs. So, it has provided opportunities for example, to counter attacks on Indian women considered by right-wing activists to be behaving inappropriately.
He suggested categories of opportunities:
Communal - there are numerous examples of communities of people with common interests sharing photos, jokes, etc.
Public, such as Wikipedia.
Civic - where there could be significant impact on our culture, such as political opposition and moves to much more openness in medical records.
Among his examples, conclusions and suggestions were:
It has taken 100 million hours of effort so far to create Wikipedia. This may seem large, but the US population consumes more hours of TV commercials than this in a weekend.
The power of brands will decline significantly.
Marketing and communications professionals need to switch from their current approach of either being in broadcast mode (advertising) or receiving mode (research), to a far more conversational approach.
In the third world, mobile is far more important than PCs, so incorporating SMS into solutions needs serious consideration.
Tags: online communities, social media
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on Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 11:34 am and is filed under Posted by Alex McLachlan.
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