27A- Reading Reflection No. 3

Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

This reading is about how people can improve the world they live in by utilizing time, networking, and technology better. It is about being more efficient with the tools available to them and how they can benefit society. Shirky argued that in order to maximize our abilities, we need to utilize the advice and conversations we have with others and use them to fix our current lives. We can take feedback and understand other people’s views. This is important when trying to market your ideas or products to other people. Understand other people allows you to tailor to their wants and needs. Technology can help in this by making communication with many people at once more possible. You can also collect more opinions from many areas with this. The idea is that you need to take advantage of how information is shared in the world around you. In order to apply these concepts in class, I would ask students to identify the encounters they have every day with other people, technology, the world, etc that provide them with new, beneficial information. I would then ask them to see if any of this information could be applied to their business idea or another business idea. I would then ask them to determine which types of mediums (technology vs person to person etc) that provide certain types of information. I would also have students identify time they spend wasting (like watching TV) and then ask them what they would be doing instead if they weren’t wasting it. They then could realize how much they may be missing out on. I was interested in seeing how much time we all waste and what would happen if we all took a bit of that wasted time and put it towards a common goal. While I think it would be difficult to convince many people to be more productive, I was surprised by how much time people actually wasted watching television. Television can provide beneficial information or stress relief, but it is used in excess.