The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals
how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators,
unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our
world.
For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time
and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught
up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay
Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new
digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and
goodwill to use at last.
Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar
boom, we''ve had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what
Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little
impact on the common good because television consumed the lion''s
share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one
another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media
that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The
results of this aggregated effort range from mind
expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as
Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government
censorship and report on acts of violence in real time.
Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus-rather
than being some strange new departure from normal behavior-actually
returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to
us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast
effects that our cognitive surplus-aided by new technologies-will
have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit
those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on
average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all
areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will
transform our civilization.
The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. As Shirky
points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the
man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia
and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the
iceberg''s tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be
improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free
time like never before.
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