Cognitive Surplus: The Impact on Fundraising and Advocacy for IBD
As the chapter on Cognitive Surplus indicated, “Since WWII, increases in GDP, educational attainment, and life span have forced the industrialized world to grapple with something we’d never had to deal with on the national scale: free time.” Our unstructured free time, has shaped our contributions to the cognitive surplus, dictated our social contribution of knowledge to sites like Wikipedia, influenced our engagement with one another and has shaped our participatory culture. With our increased amounts of free time, people are doing less of sitting in front of the television. In that regard, they are acknowledging that “you don’t need fancy tools to harness cognitive surplus.” As a society, “we always find time to do things that interest us.”
Great, but what does that actually mean? It means that as a society, our free time is focused on our passions, that our deep rooted interests. What are we doing with our free time, we are fueling our interests through communities and resources that rely on engagement with one another and participation within our population of interest.
Take Wikipedia for example. For those connected to IBD, many turn to Wikipedia to learn. This in turn creates a community of individuals looking to learn about IBD, and those contributing to the wikipedia posts hoping to enhance the general understanding of IBD. This participatory culture is focused on IBD. This article focuses on the basics of IBD. What it is, the research behind, and the signs and symptoms to highlight just a few sections. However, when you scroll to the bottom, you see all the different references. This knowledge, this source of information does not come from just one person. Instead it’s a community engaged with one another working to increase the cognitive understanding of IBD.
Discover Projects and IndieGoGo are doing the same thing. After doing some exploring on the sites it is clear that they are both platforms working to prove the point made by Cognitive Surplus: “you don’t need fancy tools to harness cognitive surplus.” These websites are platforms that require motivation and internet access to unite a population towards a common goal/interest. Take this interesting fundraising campaign as an example. Reid was fundraising for a documentary focusing on empowered patients with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis who use controversial treatments when when nothing else works. An unique topic to say the least. However, he gave information and background on the documentary and raised $6,154 as others supported his goal. Although he didn’t reach his overall goal, he proved something quite important. He was helping with social construction of knowledge about a topic that he is deeply invested in. The participatory culture online helped fundraise the money. His success through fundraising and advocacy united a population interested in the same topic. With his free time, Reid is working to be an advocate for IBD.
Although we may all debate about how much free time we do or don’t have, how we used it says a lot about us as a society. The role we play in creating communities of interest through engagement of one another online will continue to be a topic of fascination in years to come.
Picture from: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/wanted-crohn-s-end
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I agree! This ties in perfectly with the comment of “how do they have time to do that?” which is something that I always ask myself when I see people make weird youtube videos or do crazy stuff. That stuff, however, are things that people are passionate about or want to know more about, as can be the case with your Wikipedia example. You fundraising example is also awesome, as it amazes me what people can do without fancy technology or tons of money. All you need is motivation and perseverance, and you can create anything.