Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

In the past, we filled our free time with the tools at our disposal. Television became a kind of universal part-time job, and sitcoms and soap operas sponged up our cognitive surplus: the collective surfeit of time, intellect and energy at our disposal. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. New tools don't just let us consume, but to create and to share. Clay Shirky's groundbreaking book reveals what is now happening with this previously untapped talent and goodwill. From lolcats to tools for tracking voter fraud and ethnic violence, he shows how we're using our cognitive surplus for the better, and what it means for the future.

Clay Shirky

Penguin??Books

An extraordinary exploration of how technology can empower social and political organizers For the first time in history, the tools for cooperating on a global scale are not solely in the hands of governments or institutions. The spread of the internet and mobile phones are changing how people come together and get things done—and sparking a revolution that, as Clay Shirky shows, is changing what we do, how we do it, and even who we are. Here, we encounter a whoman who loses her phone and recruits an army of volunteers to get it back from the person who stole it. A dissatisfied airline passenger who spawns a national movement by taking her case to the web. And a handful of kids in Belarus who create a political protest that the state is powerless to stop. Here Comes Everybody is a revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler. "Drawing from anthropology, economic theory and keen observation, [Shirky] makes a strong case that new communication tools are making once-impossible forms of group action possible . . . [an] extraordinarily perceptive new book." -Minneapolis Star Tribune "Mr. Shirky writes cleanly and convincingly about the intersection of technological innovation and social change." -New York Observer

Here Comes Everybody Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Hardcover, 2008)

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Psnguin Pr,2008

The New Normal brings together 15 recent artworks by Sophie Calle, Mohamed Camera, Hasan Elahi, Eyebeam R & D/Jonah Peretti & Michael Frumin, Kota Ezawa, Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher, Guthrie Lonergan, Jill Magid, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Trevor Paglen, Corinna Schnitt, Thomson & Craighead, Sharif Waked and Angie Waller that use private information as raw material and subject matter. Spanning from video to websites, sculpture, found objects and photographs, the works offer access to three private contexts: the body, the home and personal data. In some cases, these contexts are accessed by force or by stealth; in other cases, the artists make use of freely available (or poorly protected) personal data online. Several of the works reflect on disclosure as a means for creating intimacy between people, while others make voluntary disclosures of personal information as an empowering form of self-representation.

The New Normal

Arts & Photography

Michael Connor

Marisa Olson

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Independent Curators International/Artists Space

For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, technology has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last.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.

Viking Adult

Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators (Chinese Edition)

Beijing United Publishing co., LTD

Uno per uno, tutti per tutti.

Codice Edizioni

Surplus cognitivo. Creatività e generosità nell'era digitale

Iedereen: hoe digitale netwerken onze contacten, samenwerking en organisaties veranderen

Business Contact

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Books by Clay Shirky