Last month I was privileged to hear Clay Shirky (author of 'Here Comes Everybody') speak at the RSA. He's a great speaker and had us all entertained with statements like: "For years Lego has been tricking their customers into assembling their products for free". But the talk was over too quickly, and left some disappointed there wasn't much new material. Mentions of Ushahidi, deterrence theory and lolcats are wearing thin now.

Any way, Shirky's talk was about the things we do in our spare time, which he calls "cognitive surplus". The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects. Traditionally this surplus time is spent watching TV and he showed us a slide comparing hours spent watching TV against those spent creating content on Wikipedia. Yes, time spent on Wikipedia is tiny by comparison, but the effect is far higher for society. Basically, his theory is that time spent online is not a waste but actually beneficial, even if you are just publishing pictures of lolcats.

I really liked Shirky's finale; he finished by saying: "We've got a choice before us. We've got this trillion hours a year. We can use it to crack each other up, and we're going to do that. That, we get for free. But we can also celebrate and support and reward the people trying to use cognitive surplus to create civic value. And to the degree we're going to do that, to the degree we're able to do that, we'll be able to change society."

Hear, hear to that!

You can see a summary of the talk for yourself on the TED website:
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world.html

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