Cognitive Surplus

"What are you doing with your free time?" might as well be the question that Clay Shirky asks of us in his book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Shirky argues that today's technologies have provided people with unprecedented means, motive and opportunity to use their free time for doing, sharing and creating things. This, in turn, compels us to reconsider our understanding of media as something that we passively consume to something that also enables us to produce and share what we have produced. "Media in the twentieth century," he writes, "was run as a single event: consumption."

"The animating question of media in that era was If we produce more, will you consume more? The answer to that question has generally been yes, as the average person consumed more TV with each passing year. But media is actually like a triathlon, with three different events: people like to consume, but they also like to produce, and to share."

Hence, people now have the ability to use their free time in productive ways that actually have value, whether for some niche group (as with most fan fiction sites or arguably even lolcats) or for society at large (think Wikipedia and open source software). By extension, this implies that the surplus free time of people, when aggregated, can actually be used to accomplish amazing things and further enable others to do the same. "The fusing of means, motive, and opportunity creates our cognitive surplus out of the raw material of accumulated free time," Shirky explains. "The real change comes from our awareness that this surplus creates unprecedented opportunities, or rather that it creates an unprecedented opportunity for us to create those opportunities for each other."

To some degree, it's a pity that Cognitive Surplus is developed more along the lines of a treatise on the social implications of twenty-first century media and based less on empirical study as such. But Shirky can be excused for this, seeing the acuteness of his observations, the cogency of his arguments and the vibrancy in his prose throughout his book. Granted, "prosumption" is already a much celebrated concept of the Internet age. Yet the historical and sociological perspective in which Shirky casts his discussion is noteworthy and particularly compelling.

Cognitive Surplus is easily required reading for those interested in the intersection of technology, society and 21st century media. Read it during your free time.