Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators Review

The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us for the better.

In his bestselling Here Comes Everybody, Internet guru Clay Shirky provided readers with a much-needed primer for the digital age. Now, with Cognitive Surplus, he reveals how new digital technology is unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For the first time, people are embracing new media that allow them to pool their efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind-expanding reference tools like Wikipedia to life-saving Web sites like Ushahidi.com, which allows Kenyans to report acts of violence in real time. Cognitive Surplus explores what's possible when people unite to use their intellect, energy, and time for the greater good.

A comparison of how parents cope with child's cognitive disabilities at different age ranges.

A comparison of how parents cope with child's cognitive disabilities at different age ranges. Review

When children are born it is often an opportunity for a parent to "show off" their child. However, when the unexpected happens, and a newborn is delivered with impairments, the parents often react quite differently from the parents whose child is "normal". Parents' management of stress resulting from their child's cognitive disabilities can affect parents' attitudes and interpersonal-relationships with their children. Their coping strategies in dealing with their child's cognitive disabilities can be critical to a child's development. For the parents of children with various low-incident disabilities, how they cope with their child is considerably different from the parents whose child is more typical. As Ross (1953) found, the success or failure of the family depends on the attitude of the parents toward their child. This can be revealed when parents with children who display low-incident disabilities demonstrate adaptations with time, effort, care, and strategies to meet the needs of their child. As a result, the parents' ways of coping are crucial to the child and the family's development.