Cognitive Surplus: Can it Change the World?

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

Clay discusses the generosity of a group of programmers that created Ushahidi, a crisis mapping system after a woman posted on her blog there was too much information for one person to go through manually.  The programmers understood what the problem was and how to fix it.  They did not 
charge for this program and provided it to others through an open source model.

There are people that have intrinsic motivation to create things for others to use and share.  We see these today in applications like Moodle and in the creation of free learning tools on-line.  

Free cultures and people in those cultures have many choices and in those choices we must figure out what we celebrate and pass on to those we influence.  We can celebrate television and make it more important then education.  On the other hand we can celebrate science, technology, and education.

Leadership is complicated, in our current environment, and many external factors influence one’s ability fully celebrate what should be celebrated and rewarded. 

The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser

In the TED talk, Beware online "filter bubbles" Eli Pariser discusses the new trend of web site tailoring results to the user.  The companies discussed specifically were Google and Yahoo news.  The problem with this filtering is that a person does not get all of the results on a topic, or the results are sorted much differently.  This could create an unbalanced information that a person gets on a specific topic.  People need balanced information on topics to better understand the world and issues around them.

As Eli points out, before the Internet we relied on humans to filter in newspapers and in the news broadcasted on TV with journalism ethics be used as a set of standards.  The guidelines and principles are these companies using?