About a million years ago, when the internet was navigated with command line and one had to know what to do when confronted with "$" on the VT200 emulator, I joined a merry band of f
olks on a NYC community call Panix, still to this day, a high-quality, high-value vista on the internet superhighway. Right away, I knew I was lost and needed help. The Panix community was populated with Very Busy and Very Talented people, some of whom were happy to lend a hand to us hopeless newbies and clays was particuarly patient and helpful. I came to learn that clays was the nom du net for Mr. Shirky who would become famous far beyond the Panix neighborhood.
clays grew up and did a lot of good consulting work for, among others, Nokia, the BBC, Newscorp, Microsoft, BP, Global Business Network, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Navy, the Libyan government, and Lego. Because he's a pretty good writer too, he's been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Harvard Business Review and Wired. He has a great perch at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University where Stacey Horn of EchoNYC (another pioneer) has taught.
Anyway, clays has already written a great book, Here Comes Everybody, but his new book, Cognitive Surplus, looks to be even better. Here's an extract from the flap copy:
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.
Okay, I'm hooked. Can't wait.
