LifeHacker alerts us of Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.
Matt Haughey describes Shirky’s thesis thusly:
The gist of the story Clay weaves is how we’ve spent the previous 50 years staring at televisions but the internet enables us to finally talk back, and even tiny slices of the time wasted watching TV when applied towards some collective output can result in massive repositories of information like Wikipedia. He shows many contemporary examples of online collaboration beyond Wikipedia.org and breaks down the motivations for contributors that cites plenty of sociology, psychology, and economics research to back his points up.
It’s now easier than ever to share your knowledge or ideas with others:
Back in the early days of the web and even blogging, you had to be a programmer, developer, or at least technically minded enough to write your own software, publish your own HTML, and manage your sites using many disparate tools. It was very much like the days of very early television where the guys that could control the cameras wrote all the shows because there wasn’t any other way. In 2010, we thankfully have a ton of simple to use tools like Twitter, Tumblr, and Posterous that take the need to be a programmer or developer out of the equation and simply let anyone say what they want with minimal knowledge and minimal friction.
If we can capture just a fraction of our extra cognitive capacity, we can accomplish a lot. Information is Beautiful visualizes the potential with this graph:
Here’s a talk Shirky gave a couple years ago on this concept (with part II). It’s something interesting to chew on. Thanks to our chronic unemployment problem, we’ve now got more cognitive surplus to tap into than ever before.