Today, as any other day, I was going through my Twitter feed. As usual it was full of stories on anything from politics through tech news to personal outbursts. As I was scrolling through tweets like “How to fix iClouds biggest annoyances”, “Must-reads from around the world”, and “I listen to this song on repeat this week!”, I couldn’t help but stop for a moment, when I got to “15 incredible dog photobombs” from @HuffingtonPost.
Not that I’m a big fan of photobombs in general or loldogs (or lolcats for that matter) in particular. But I did pause while I thought to myself how incredible stupid it sounded. And then of course I clicked the link. I wasn’t impressed although the one titled “Wazzup” did make me smile.
Clik here to view.
Screen dump from Huffington Post
However stupid and bland the gallery might be, I couldn’t help but think of Clay Shirky and his book “Cognitive Surplus” from 2010. In his book Shirky argues that media in the 20th century made us into passive consumers and couch potatoes. We would sit in front of a TV for hours without contributing or doing anything ourselves. But this changed when the Internet was invented and we got new media technologies. We still like to consume, but we also like to interact, create and share, and now we can do just that.
From Lolcats to revolutions
Shirky gives plenty of examples of how our creative surplus is put to work when we create, collaborate and even start revolutions. In this TEDtalk Shirky sums of some of his main points from the book.
If you choose to spend 13:08 minutes watching the video, you will learn that his examples have a wide reach from Ushahidi to lolcats. Ushahidi was originally a website created in 2007 during the presidential election in Kenya, where eyewitness reports on violence where collected and shared thanks to crowdsourcing technologies. Whereas lolcats are cute pictures of cats with a funny caption…
And yes, you can say many things about lolcats (or loldogs in my Twitter-instance today). But however stupid and useless they are, somebody still made an effort to come up with a caption, write it on an image and upload the whole lot in order for others to enjoy.
As Shirky puts it in his TEDtalk: “The stupidest creative act is still a creative act”.
Aim higher
I didn’t write this piece to promote lolcats, but the image gallery made me think. The cat pictures might not be cleaver or beautiful, but at least they are something. I agree with Shirky that we should use today’s technology to aim higher than to make funny lolcats.
However, we can’t all create revolutions, but we can all be creative.