TED Talk #4: Clay Shirky

Clay Skirky's TED Talk was very interesting and gave everyone food for thought. His ideas about motivation and  cognitive surplus are unique and quite interesting. However, I found some of the terms he was talking about hard to follow and understand.

Shirky, unlike the other speakers, doesn't use humor in his TED Talk. He also tends to talk with his hands and makes a lot of gestures to the screen behind him but he doesn't focus on the screen, it's just there for the audience to look at while he talks. 


Shirky talks about something called Cognitive Surplus. This means that people can share their ideas and other people can interact with them through the internet. Like global websites to wall cats:

He says that we can and should use cognitive surplus to create civic values in the world.


Shirky says that a single idea can become a global deployment in less than 3 years, as proved by a certain website called Ushahidi:

Skirky talks about a few things in his TED Talk, one of them is about motivation. And he says: motivation ideas state that a punishment should make someone do something less. However, due to an experiment where there was a fine to parents who picked up their kids late changed this idea. Many would've said that the amount of parents picking up late would've decreased but that number actually increased. What does this mean for ideas about motivation?


This video matters to the world because the world wide web is all over the world and everyone can access it and utilize it in many different ways to accomplish many tasks. It matters to education so kids can learn to access and use the web to help themselves in the world. This video matter to me personally because it's good that I learn skills to use the web so I can stay involved with the world becoming more technologically advanced.