Cognitive Surplus is a fascinating book, which following on from the success of Shirky's first book Here Comes Everybody, is sure to introduce another big idea into the digital vernacular. The eponymous idea of the title is that the rise of an increasingly affluent society has created a surplus of time and talent which can be (and is being) harnessed on the Internet for productive and socially useful purposes.
This is radical concept but just as importantly Shirky's book also brilliantly assesses the role that digital technology really plays in changing human behaviour. Shirky’s main premise in this regard is that as human behavior is actually motivation filtered through opportunity, technology is not fundamentally changing human behaviour, it is just providing new opportunities for us to express our underlying human motivations. This is an extremely important insight as it helps to explain some of the ‘new’ social behaviours such as music sharing on Napster that have either been wrongly labelled as signs of our moral decline or as indicators of our progress towards a social utopia.
Indeed in Clay’s own words:
“The rise of music sharing isn’t a social calamity involving general lawlessness; nor is it the dawn of a new age of human kindness. It’s just new opportunities linked to old motives via the right incentives. When you get that right, you can change the way people interact with one another in fairly fundamental ways, and you can shape people’s behavior around things as simple as sharing music and as complex as civic engagement.”
This may not have grabbed the headlines, or the title, in the same way the idea of a cognitive surplus has but it is just as profound.
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