Cognitive Surplas

This is a very striking visualization centering around the idea of  ”Cognitive Surplas” which is the idea that consumers; like you and me have, thanks to the increased use of focused technology,  become more keen to collaborate with others for the greater good.

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.

For decades, technology has encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Take the obvious example of the Television.  Now, technology has finally caught up with human potential. Check for example sites like Wikipedia – mentioned above, Twitter, Facebook and even the fairly primitive Yahoo! Answers. Sites such as the ones mentioned above have provided users with a collaborative environment to fundamentally share information: Freely. These sites are allowing un-tapped human talent/ability to be put to good use (finally!). Even look at sites like Money Saving Expert – through community and indeed ‘talking’ virtually to others you can even find out where the best place is to put your money, be that in a savings account or even a high interest paying current account.

Citizens of the world have (truth be told) be surbanized and educated by a postwar boom, we’ve had a surfeit of intellect, energy and indeed Cognitive Surplas.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.

Clay Sharky, author of the book Cognitive Surplas (link above) 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.