The Power of Creativity -Clay Shirky

           Clay Shirky begins his talk with a story. A while ago in Kenya, there was a dispute over the presidential election. A local lawyer started a blog in which people could post anything they wanted to about the issues. Basically, it was impossible for her to publish all of this information. And thus, Ushahidi was born. Ushahidi is something that is called “crisis mapping”. Here is a photo.

When you click on the little red blips, you can read articles about what is going on in that area. By incorporating the humor of LOLcats and his personal opinions, Shirky goes on to explain the positives of a world with connected knowledge or “cognitive surplus”.

This leads to an interesting question.  What would the world be like if we all shared everything we know? After all, no single person knows what everyone knows. Take a look at the International Space Station. Would all of those advances in science have been possible if it was just the “national” space station? Mmm…probably not. It is human generosity that forms collaborations like Ushahidi and the space station.  In my opinion, there are two different types of generosity. Passive and active. Passive generosity is just writing a check to a local charity and that’s that. This is pretty lazy. Active generosity is fully committing yourself to a cause. You show up, do hard work, and then you STILL want to come back and do more. Writing a check is no substitute for actually being involved.

The internet has supplied the world with a very easy way in which to be involved. People are always looking for information or entertainment. They wouldn’t be able to find anything unless someone else had already posted it for the entire world to see. It’s easy to understand that we look up information for assignments or general knowledge and that we need entertainment to escape the previously stated assignments. But why on earth would someone post this information and/or entertainment in the first place? That just seems like a lot of work! These people aren’t even being payed to do so. Some even pay the internet in order to post. Is there some human instinct that makes us all want to create, share, and launch our ideas out into the world? Were we always like this? If we were, then it was a little harder to notice than it is now. Before, there weren’t many outlets in which to express ourselves or do things like charity work. Maybe the reason that human generosity wasn’t seen in the same way as Clay Shirky sees it is because we were never given a chance to actually do anything that was even slightly easy to access. Creativity is everywhere you look now. Even look at the computer you are reading this on right now. Someone had to come up with a way to put all of this information into one box. Someone had to design the clean lines on it. Heck, someone had to think of what color to make it in! They wouldn’t have just done that because they were being payed (even though that’s most of the reason). Some people just like to create in order to make life better. So, are we equipped with a natural sense that we need to give? I do believe so.

Clay Shirky points out that, if everyone on the entire planet was combined, they would hold over a trillion hours of free time every year. We can all give back. It doesn’t matter how you do it or how big your cause is. If you work to make the world suck a little bit less, it will be worth it. What would you do with your trillion hours?