Cognitive Surplus

"Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age"

by Clay Shirky

"Cognitive Surplus" is a fancy term for free time (of educated people in the industrialized world). Shirky points out that ever since industrialization got underway in early 20th century, most middle class educated masses got a lot of free time on their hands. But a majority of this free time got taken up by television. It was not that being passive consumers of material produced by a few professionals is what we all like, but there weren't many alternatives. But now the rise of "social media" has suddenly made available to the public a tool to satisfy our innate desire to share and be part of a community. It's not that YouTube and WikiPedia.Org have suddenly made educated human beings more creative and generous, but these tools have enabled us to behave in our natural social way, which wasn't possible earlier.

Citing examples of social sites forming a broad spectrum, form the no-use-for-the-society-what-so-ever http://icanhascheezburger.com/, through OpenSource software projects like every-author's favorite Apache Web-server, through PatientsLikeMe.com, through Pakistan's http://zimmedarshehri.com/ (Responsible Citizens) to Ushahidi (http://www.ushahidi.com/) the social network that allows people to upload first hand reports of electoral and other violence in Africa and other places, he illustrates his point amply.

This book suffers from the same malady that Malcolm Gladwell's books suffer from: there is only enough material for a magazine article there. But in order to make a book out of it, these authors repeat the same stuff over and over, and explain simple points laboriously as though teaching a moron. That makes it quite irritating, even though the subject matter is interesting and there are nuggets of new information here and there.

The other highly annoying thing with these books is that they all refer to the same case studies. If you have read Dan Ariely's original "Predictably Irrational" and a couple of I-have-a-pseudo-theory-based-on-other-peoples-research books like Daniel Pink's "Drive", it gets quite repetitive. The only reason I still read such books (usually written by professional writers or journalists who have no expertise on the subject matter) is that it's a one-stop-shop to learn about a topic quickly, instead of reading 10 original books/papers.

The real value in Cognitive Surplus is the last chapter named "looking for the mouse" (in a TV: a metaphor for the new generation taking interaction in media for granted). Here Shirky ties in all the various slightly different threads he weaves in the previous chapters together and provides a coherent summary of his thesis. In addition, he provides some practical tips for would be social networking innovators based on his experience in dabbling with this stuff.

The bottom-line is, if you are neck deep in "social media" already, you may not learn much here. If you haven't participated much in this revolution so far, or if you haven't read any of the popular social science, behavioral economics books of the past few years, this will be a good read. If the middle of the book starts to bore you, jump to the last chapter. You won't miss much.