Summary:
The article "Does the Internet Make you Smarter?" by Clay Shirky covers a brief history of the way inventions have changed the way people solve problems and even what is 'normal', as well as discussing how current inventions are changing how people solve problems and what is normal. After discussing how the printing press in part led to the protest reformation, he goes to the effects of the internet. Shirky discusses how many people view the internet as waste of effort, creating a scream of low quality content, he counters by mentioning how erotic novels were printed before peer reviewed journals.
Like the printing press made peer review journals possible, the internet is making distributed effort projects much easier. Wikipedia, and a health care program called 'PatientsLikeMe' have been created using the world's cognitive surplus. Only connected together for these projects due to the internet.
Like the printing press made peer review journals possible, the internet is making distributed effort projects much easier. Wikipedia, and a health care program called 'PatientsLikeMe' have been created using the world's cognitive surplus. Only connected together for these projects due to the internet.
Keywords:
- New Norms: Changes to the way we use something cant take hold, for example printed material became the 'new norm' for reading material after the invention of the printing press. The technological revolution is currently changing our norms again to 'new norms' again.
- Cognitive Surplus: The extra energy educated people have to work or not work on projects they care about. In history, this gave the rise to things such as the scientific revolution through peer review, but now is being used via the internet on large scale projects such as wikipedia, or other open source projects.