Remember the last time you read a great story that you caught yourself peaking at the remaining unread pages because you didn’t want the story to end? That’s how I can best describe Clay Shirky‘s book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. His stories were coming to a close before I was ready to put the book down.
This is a great follow-up to his first book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Shirky is right on target with engaging, connecting stories to share his ideas about our new ability today to share collective knowledge.
Over 1 trillion hours of TV is watched per year. Imagine what can happen when people turn TV off and begin contributing. And Shirky elegantly shares the shifting nature of professionals vs. amateurs in the age of the internet. Pretty amazing reading.
I believe there have been attempts to move in the direction he outlines but a tipping point has been the mass availability of consumer devices at very affordable price points. I recall Peter Gabriel‘s interview on the Today Show in 1988 talking about the efforts of Amnesty International and their attempts to videotape human rights abuses with large, analog cameras.
Today we know all to well from the murder of Oscar Grant that cameraphones have made their efforts real.
The Napster thing
IMHO Clay’s single oversight in the book surrounds Napster. I think he was trying to communicate a holistic answer to why people (not just Gen Xers) were stealing music. He called it sharing — it was stealing plain and simple.