Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age is Clay Shirky’s latest and greatest. As I’m sure many of you know, he is one of the most forward thinkers on the internet revolution (if not you may want to check out his very popular TED Talks). His quotes find it into copious presentations, his influence is immense. His new book does not disappoint-my underlined, dog-eared, twice read copy is physical evidence of the awesomeness.

This book is filled with insightful provocations–there would be no way I would be able to touch on all of them in this post. His examples are designed to make you think, but it won’t tell you what we necessarily need to do with the issue at hand. While so many books on social media are filled with best practices and rules, this one takes a well needed step back and looks at the sociocultural context in which the internet revolution lives in. And Shirky (rightly) postulates that there is no magical “master strategy”, rather navigating “what works” in this new space will require several smaller experiments, few of which will be marvelous and successful, most which will be deemed “failures” by many.

The questions that Shirky works to answer are the biggies:

- Why is social media as important as it is to us? The notion of a “cognitive surplus” –a consequence of the postwar boom, the surplus of energy, intellect and time which was once nearly completely consumed by television– is detailed drawing on behavioral/motivation theory to support his thesis. (the cog sci in me was thrilled!) This surplus is now being aggregated in these new mediums at a low cost (both monetary and time).

- Why is there this aversion to accepting it as a new part of communicating? He uses a lovely reoccurring reference “Gutenberg economics” likening the advent of movable type of  as similar to that of social media today. The democratization of the written word is much like the democratization of ideas and the ability to SHARE freely (changing what “publishing” means across the board). His general answer:

- “Professional” versus “amateur” (Zagat vs Yelp, Youtube vs. Studios, etc). While he believes there’s a lot of cognitive surplus that’s not necessarily going to the BEST of use (perhaps those LOLCats could be something slightly more useful), he recognizes that there is an intrinsic motivation when an “amateur” creates something (he/she is doing it for the LOVE of the craft) versus a professional who does it for a living. Additionally, without the “bad” there would be no “good”…

Thank you Mr. Shirky, for giving readers the respect to illuminate issues with your examples/insight and putting the onus back on them to move forward and make decisions that will shape (all) our collective future.

READ IT! You’ll thank me later…

Image via: Cognections Blog