Cognitive Surplus

Download or read book Cognitive Surplus written by Clay Shirky and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us for the better. In his bestselling Here Comes Everybody, Internet guru Clay Shirky provided readers with a much-needed primer for the digital age. Now, with Cognitive Surplus, he reveals how new digital technology is unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For the first time, people are embracing new media that allow them to pool their efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind-expanding reference tools like Wikipedia to life-saving Web sites like Ushahidi.com, which allows Kenyans to report acts of violence in real time. Cognitive Surplus explores what's possible when people unite to use their intellect, energy, and time for the greater good.

Download or read book Here Comes Everybody written by Clay Shirky and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses and uses examples of how digital networks transform the ability of humans to gather and cooperate with one another.

Download or read book The New Capitalist Manifesto written by Umair Haque and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this manifesto-style book, radical economist and strategist Umair Haque calls for the end of the corrupt business ideals that exemplify business as usual. His passionate vision for "Capitalism 2.0," or "constructive capitalism," is one in which old paradigms of wasteful growth, inefficient competition, and self-destructive ideals are left far behind at this reset moment. According the Haque, the economic crisis was not a market failure or even a financial crisis, but an institutional one. Haque details a holistic five-step plan for both reducing the negative and exploitive nature of the current system and ensuring positive social and economic growth for the future. Haque calls for a reexamination of ideals, and urges business away from competition and rivalries and toward a globally-conscious and constructive model--and a constructive future. Haque argues that companies must learn to orient their business models around: - renewal in order to maximize efficiency - equity in order to maximize productivity - meaning in order to maximize effectiveness - democracy in order to maximize agility - peace in order to maximize evolvability These new business ideals focus on the human element - not profit exclusively - and are easily tailored for any size or type of business, as long as they are willing to make bold and sustained changes to the current system.

Download or read book Here Comes Everybody written by Clay Shirky and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2009-02-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to the new future of involvement. Forming groups is easier than it�s ever been: unpaid volunteers can build an encyclopaedia together in their spare time, mistreated customers can join forces to get their revenge on airlines and high street banks, and one man with a laptop can raise an army to help recover a stolen phone. The results of this new world of easy collaboration can be both good (young people defying an oppressive government with a guerrilla ice-cream eating protest) and bad (girls sharing advice for staying dangerously skinny) but it�s here and, as Clay Shirky shows, it�s affecting � well, everybody. For the first time, we have the tools to make group action truly a reality. And they�re going to change our whole world.

Download or read book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction written by Alan Jacobs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.

Download or read book The Attention Economy written by Claudio Celis Bueno and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The attention economy is a notion that explains the growing value of human attention in societies characterised by post-industrial modes of production. In a world in which information and knowledge become central to the valorisation process of capital, human attention becomes a scarce and hence increasingly valuable commodity. To what degree is the attention economy a specific form of capitalist production? How does the attention economy differ from the industrial mode of production in which Marx developed his critique of capitalism? How can Marx’s theory be used today despite the historical differences that separate industrial from post-industrial capitalism? The Attention Economy argues that human attention is a new form of labour that can only be understood through a systematic reinterpretation of Marx. It argues that the attention economy belongs to a general shift in capitalism in which subjectivity itself becomes the territory of production and exploitation of value as well as the territory of the reproduction of capitalist power relations.

Download or read book The Democratic Surround written by Fred Turner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “smart and fascinating” reassessment of postwar American culture and the politics of the 1960s from the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Reason Magazine). We tend to think of the sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround, the decades that brought us the Korean War and communist witch hunts also witnessed an extraordinary turn toward explicitly democratic, open, and inclusive ideas of communication—and with them new, flexible models of social order. Surprisingly, he shows that it was this turn that brought us the revolutionary multimedia and wild-eyed individualism of the 1960s counterculture. In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and ‘50s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember. He tracks the influential mid-century entwining of Bauhaus aesthetics with American social science and psychology. From the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Turner shows how some of the best-known artists and intellectuals of the forties developed new models of media, new theories of interpersonal and international collaboration, and new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self in direct contrast to the repression and conformity associated with the fascist and communist movements. He then shows how their work shaped some of the most significant media events of the Cold War, including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the multimedia performances of John Cage, and, ultimately, the psychedelic Be-Ins of the sixties. Turner demonstrates that by the end of the 1950s this vision of the democratic self and the media built to promote it would actually become part of the mainstream, even shaping American propaganda efforts in Europe. Overturning common misconceptions of these transformational years, The Democratic Surround shows just how much the artistic and social radicalism of the sixties owed to the liberal ideals of Cold War America, a democratic vision that still underlies our hopes for digital media today. “Brilliant . . . [an] excellent and thought-provoking book.” —Tropics of Meta