In Clay Shirky’s “Cognitive Surplus”, Clay goes on to speak about the meaningful ways of sharing content through social media outlets such as Wikipedia or just webpages alone intended on relaying information to the outside world. He uses an example of how people decided to share Kenyan war outbreaks and civil unrest virally through internet posts and video clips on a particular website called Ushahidi.com. He also went on to discuss that there are websites that post information and video clips out of mere nonsense such as ICanHasCheezburger.com and he views this as social media garbage.
In my experience with this type of social media sharing, I believe that its just another form of entertainment, however it can unite people together. One very new community page that was just started not too long ago on Facebook just happens to deal with Baruch. It is called Baruch Memes, and while this group does post images with funny captions such as “Takes Intro to Business….Starts Giving Financial Advice”, it not only provides a sort of parody on Baruch’s everyday life, but it gives students a sort of unity. I don’t believe this is a waste of time, because if something happened in the school such as another student protest (as Baruch had previously last year), then people would instantly know about the next event through social media community pages. I don’t think that every social media page dealing with a serious matter is instantly deemed the only kind of information relay. Any kind of social media community can benefit from its users, as everyone can share their opinion and any useful information, if ever needed.
I’m really enjoying the Baruch Meme site. That’s a great example of cognitive surplus in action. It’s interesting to see Internet humor, particularly memes, enter the main stream though I’m sure we’ll get sick of it soon. You might illustrate your point by including an image from the meme site in your post. Always good to show as well as tell.