So ive been rolling these new ideas around in my head after reading Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, by Clay Shirky. Everyone has the urge to create and share no matter how significant what you share is or is not. It gives you a sense of accomplishment to know that what you shared might have an impact on someone or something somewhere. Basically this book is about how people choose to share things in their free time over the internet. People share within an online community for fun, or they share with intention to collaborate and create socially valuable information, or they share to collaborate to help a cause. Now this is all fine and good and gives people an outlet for their creativity and extra energy that is not spent at work doing things that they most likely have not chose to do.

Which brings me to my first point, too many rules at work. People want to do good work for the sole reason that in completing a task will give you a sense of accomplishment and make you feel good, Bosses sometimes like to expect that you don’t want to do a good job and he’s going to put all these rules and restraints on you in order to make sure you do exactly what he wants you to do, ie. what he says is a good job. Yeah yeah, this is what work is, someone gives you a job and you do it, I get it. All Im saying is that social contraints win over contractual constraints and people need to start realizing this. PEOPLE WANT TO DO GREAT THINGS, IT MAKES THEM HAPPY, but if you hire a person to work for you, trust them, listen to them, and leave them to it.

Okay, my second point. Im not really sure where this is going to end up. I spend about 50-60 hours  in front of a computer screen a week sometimes more, so maybe im just bitter about the fact that im on my ass in a cube for so many hours when life is outside my window calling me to come play. But also the internet is the future, and that’s great because I feel that the job I do has great potential to shape that future and guide the interwebs to weave a soft, strong and comfortable experience for all that visit. It’s amazing that all of this steaming information from all over the world from everyone with internet access can be collected and categorized and valued on so many different levels and create this collective consciousness that transcends time and location and all sorts of physical contraints. One Hundred years ago friends in different states could keep in touch by phone, or letter, or traveling to visit each other if they had the means. Friends that were living in the same town would see each other at the store, in town, out at a town event, visit each others homes and so on. The strength of your friendship would be based largely on location and schedule. Face to face communication was how you shared information within your towns community. You had the community you lived in and that was your only option. I like to think about these times a simpler. I would see my friend Dorothy at the market and I would ask her if she was going to the town square this friday. We would talk about the planned events, part ways, and sure enough see each other there on friday because where else was there to go in your town on a friday night? Maybe the bar, but everyone probably went there every other night of the week so the party in the town square was the obvious choice. What im trying to get at here is that in this smaller community with limited transcendance of information, you had fewer options on what to do, what to learn, how to learn, and who to learn it from so even if you did not want to take up your fathers trade it was probably your best option for success. You got taught every aspect about what he did and how he did it whether you liked it or not, and because of that you carried on this information and skill and learned more about it yourself and adapted to the times and provided the best service for YOUR community and everyone respected you for that. Maybe back then this type of sharing wasn’t exactly what you wanted to do or made you happy, but you certainly didn’t have all this cognitive surplus hanging around. And maybe a simple life of not knowing about everything that is going on everywhere in the world and with everyone else and their dogs ultimately DID allow you to enjoy life a little more.