Video: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010186.html TRANSCRIPT: http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html (via Wade Olson, http://wadejolson.wordpress.com/)
" [...] I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching /Gilligan's Island/, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes."
People are starting to realise what freedom is... What free, collaborative (participatory) culture is.
Free software juggernauts are advancing full speed ahead... But there is still a long and hard battle ahead of us.
Hooray! Bogdan
Bogdan Bivolaru bogdan.bivolaru@gmail.com writes:
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.
Very nice. I'll take that anecdote and find people who need to learn it :-)
Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.
What's the referent of "this"?
Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching /Gilligan's Island/, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
Yes, yes, yes.
"If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes."
What's "cognitive surplus"?
On Fri, 2008-05-02 at 00:20 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
What's "cognitive surplus"?
I believe Bogdan was using the term as described Clay in Shirky's book "Here Comes Everybody" - http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/ - which made the front page of slashdot a few days ago: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/27/1422258
Essentially, it refers to the many person-hours of thought in a society that are not used for primary (work-hour) activities. While most of the cognitive surplus is spent on "passive" consumption of media (almost 2000 Wikipedias a year on sitcoms in the US alone), more and more is now invested in work that benefits society as a whole.
/Stian