book review for Cognitive Surplus' by Clay Shirky

1. Cognitive Surplus
-Clay Shirky
Summary by Dáire Bermingham

2. Gin, Television, Online/Cognitive surplus
• London 1720’s – Industrial Revolution - ‘Gin
Craze’
“anesthetizing themselves” from harshness and
stresses of a new world….
“Eight hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, and 8
hours for what we want”
– Popular chant amongst workers , led to more free
time....
What is it we do in our free time to deal with life
now in a post industrial world?

3. T.V to Online
• 1720’s – Gin was the cure
• 1960’s – we spent over 20 hours a week in front
of T.V - “Passive Consumption”
• Today is the first time in the history of television
that young people are watching less television
than their elders.
• Today knowledge is crucial – we are paid to think
rather than to produce (service V.S
Manufacturing)
• Thus, in our spare time we build on this
Knowledge.... Via the Internet!

4. Online
• We share our knowledge and participate in
similar social groups to build on knowledge,
specifically in what we are interested in...
• 24 hours access to Online around the globe
+
• Sudden increase in the rise of educated
population
= Cognitive Surplus

5. Online
• Offers the opportunity to answer back to the screen
unlike T.V
• e.g
- Youtube, - Share, view, respond
• Young people shifting away from media that
presupposes pure consumption
• Ushahidi – Kenyan blog – media banned during
political tensions in Kenya
- Citizens began to report online on the ‘truth’ of affairs–
together they Harnessed their Cognitive Surplus by
users from various areas posting stories online

6. Participatory Culture
• We now act as our presence matters rather than
simply consume.
• Radically changing Media landscape
in 20th century media was a single event:
• Consumption
Now its more of a triathlon:
• Consumption
• Produce
• Share

7. T.V Against Computer
• T.V is unbalanced
- It can speak to you but you cant speak to it
• Computer
- Allows you to consume digital media but also
allows you share material and chat with
friends

8. What exactly is ‘Cognitive Surplus’?
• It is a new resource
How is it made available?
1) Free time – in particular amongst the worlds
educated population – (altogether build up of
over a trillion hours)
2) Public access to media – average citizen is no
longer locked out to pool that free time in
pursuit of activities they like or care about

9. Means – how it works?
• Social media – unpredictable – led by consumer
demand
- Korean boy band website – DBSK
Conversation arose over re-importation of U.S beef of
which users disagreed with for health reasons. Began
to organise protests on the website – nothing to do
with Boy band – however all were a similar
demographic who managed to mobilize together and
bring discussion from cyberspace to protests in the
real world.
• Protests successful and changed the way Korean
standards of policy making

10. Means
• Scale is crucial for success
- Below a certain threshold of users the system
will hardly work at all while above the
threshold more is better
- E.g Pickuppal.com
- carpooling site designed to coordinate drivers
and riders to travel along the same road
- Scale is crucial for success

11. Means – how online is changing media
• THE BUTTON MARKED ‘PUBLISH’
- “Publishing use to be something we had to ask
permission to do”
- newfound ability to speak publicaly and to pool our
capabilities is so different from what we’re used to that
we have to rethink the basic concept of media
- Access to publishing used to be scarce
- now it isn't - we are all reporters and can voice our
opinion without being a professional
- This is groundbreaking to democracy as it avoids an
elitist only access to media

12. Means - how online is changing media
• People are sharing their;
- Writing
- Videos
- Medical symptoms
• In the past - movie reviews were written by movie reviewers
and reporting came from reporters
• anyone could produce a photograph, a piece of writing, but
they had no way to make it widely public
- i.e Sending a message to the Public wasn't for the Public to
do –Today is different...
• London bombings - within 80 mins 1,300 blogs reflected on it
it being explosives before Government had publicaly laid rest
to power surge rumours

13. Means – changing behaviour
• These new kinds of media are providing
means for new behaviour....
But what is it that is motivating the people to
behave differently...?
What are some of our most innate motivations
as human beings that attract us to the
Internet

14. Motive – Digital Insights
• Love over Gold
- ‘puzzle challenge’ with Soma Cube* used to
make various shapes
Split into two sections with a break of 8 mins in
between
Challenge was actually to see how subjects
acted during the 8 min break? Continue
playing Soma or take a complete break?
*Soma cube – wooden cube subdivided into 7 smaller pieces, each of the 7 are unique
and can be assembled into larger cube only in one way; they can also be put together to
make millions of other shapes

15. Motive – digital Insights
• Soma
- 1st time – subjects spent half of the 8 min break
working on the puzzle – 4 mins
- 2nd time – same group was split into two groups
of 12.
- Group A – to be paid a dollar for every shape
- Group B- same as before – no pay
• Group A spent 1 min longer during the break
than before as they saw this as a potential source
of income

16. Motive – digital Insights
• Soma
3rd and final meeting
• all 24 subjects called back
Repeat Challenge the same as the first one with no
financial incentive
Result
Group A showed markedly less interest in Puzzle
during break - - average time spent dropped by
2mins

17. Motive – digital Insights
• Love and Gold – Insight/Conclusion;
• An Extrinsic motivation like being paid can crowd out an
intrinsic one like enjoying something for its own sake.
i.E; The group that was paid to assemble the Soma pieces
had their intrinsic motivations diminished. Their sense of
autonomy was crowded out by the presence of a
predictable extrinsic reward
• Highlights the difference between amateurism and
professionalism and justifies why people are willing to
give up their free time to upload video’s/reports/reviwes
etc online without any extrinsic rewards.
• Amateurs – comes from latin amare – to love

18. Motive – digital Insights
• Autonomy and Competence
- The internet allows individuals to exercise both of
these.
• Posting your own video or owning your own
website can bring great satisfaction to individuals
unlike T.V where we simply consume
• People prefer to feel empowered and as if they
are taking part – it gives them a sense of
ownership – this again is why people are happy to
post videos on YouTube without expecting an
extrinsic reward to return.

19. Motive – digital Insights
• Membership and Generosity
• This is what the internet relies onto operate
• We have social motivations to feel to connect and
share.
• Internet encourages this membership and sharing
“The web means we’re finally being exposed to the full
range of what people are actually interested in” – can
meet people 24/7 who are interested in some of the
most bizarre things
• Knitting socks etc
• Basically online its very hard to feel alone

20. Opportunities
• We now have the tools for communicating
and sharing with a new means for indulging
ourselves in these motivations
• This offers ways of taking advantage of the
ability to participate in concert where we
previously consumed alone
• Important to remember:
- Technology enables these sharing behaviors
but it does’nt cause them – humans do

21. Opportunities
• Skateboards and Easels
• Southern California - 1970’s drought and recession left many
swimming pools dry
• Group of skateboarders – ‘The Z boys’ – revolutionized the
sport.
• Began skating up the walls and across the bottom to the other
wall
• Exchanged tips and tricks – Shared advice
• The Z boys eventually discovered the half pipe by
experimenting and working together
• These ideas spread through spirited competition and
changed the world of Skateboarding forever
• Moral of story – Achievements of the participants develop
faster than if the participants were all pursuing the identical
goals without sharing – Sharing is the key as we learn from
eachother

22. Opportunities
• Skateboard and Easels–application to internet
• The internet offers us ability to share on wide scale....
Imagine the breakthroughs that can happen with people
constantly working together... More of wikipedia’s and
Facebooks, and Twiters....
• By harnessing our cognitive surplus (collectively one trillion
hours per year)
• Who knows the outcome or the direction it will go, no0one
would have expected a swimming pool to revolutionize
skateboarding
- Often tools capabilities don't completely determine its
ultimate function

23. Opportunities
• ‘The Ultimate game’
- Two subjects, proposer and responder, spilt $10, if
responder rejects neither keep money
- Rarely did people take huge chunk and if they did
responder would not accept money
• Contradicts neoclassical economics that humans act in self
interesting and rational ways
i.e. typical response should be 9:1 as received would be $1
better of if he/she refuses
• Instead experiment proved that Humans care about
relationships: typical proposal offer was between $4 and $5
Conclusion:
• We are incapable of behaving as if we weren't members of
a larger society, as if we didn't gauge the effects of our
actions with membership in that society

24. Opportunities
• Online offers this collaboration and relationship building
that we as humans demonstrate as part of our nature
- Apache web server – public effort to improve global servers
- Grobanites Charity – Since 2002 raised 1 million dollars –
not bad for unpaid amateurs
- Arab Spring (not in book) – discuss in forums and meet in
protest
- Napster – users upload their own music and share
• Much of these efforts to enrich each others lives would
have been deemed impossible until the internet
• Especially the case when all of this is done at no cost!
• Its a lot of work but when spread across thousands even
millions of people it becomes highly effective
• As the old saying goes – “many hands make light work”

25. Opportunities
The Past
• 20th century beliefs about who could produce and consume
public messages, about who could coordinate group action
and how, and about the inherent and fundamental link
between intrinsic motivation and private actions have all been
turned on their head
Today
• This increase in our ability to create things together to pool
our free time and particular talents into something useful, is
one of the great new opportunities of the age, one that
changes the behaviours of people who take advantage of it.

26. Culture of Sharing
• “The invisible college’ - 1645
• group of scientists discovered advances in;
- Chemistry
- Biology
- Astronomy
- Optics
• Agreed to refuse to believe things that weren't
demonstrably true and to share this information
• By insisting on accuracy and transparency and by sharing
their assumptions and working methods with one another
the collegians had access to the groups collective
knowledge and constituted a collaborative circle
• This is how the invisible college transmitted alchemy into
chemistry

27. Culture of Sharing
• Printing press – increased literacy – increased knowledge
• Spread of telegraph
- Increased global knowledge – changed the way we viewed
the world and acted
• 3 things that make knowledge more combinable
1) Increase in community size
2) Decrease in cost of sharing
3) Increase in clarity
and the 4th is culture!
- As we have seen from the invisible college . a
communities set of shared assumptions about how it
should go about its work, and about its members relations
with one another is crucial to the spread of knowledge
(no hoarding gombeen men allowed) – (not in book)

28. Culture of Sharing
• This is also what the internet does
- By having access to this cognitive surplus we are given
access to a vast array of information that can create
movements and discoveries that can also create new
value to mankind
• Old saying
- 1 stick
- Someone gives you another
- 2 sticks better than 1
- If you have knowledge of rubbing the two = fire
 Created new value

29. Culture of Sharing
• www.patientslikeme.com
- share experiences with treatment
- Supplies a kind of support that doctors rarelt can
i.e conversation with fellow sufferers
- knowing your not the only 1 going through a
disease can be a great relief for patients
• When thousands share data they open up the
health care system. They learn what's working for
others. They improve dialogue with their doctors.
Best of all, they help bring better treatments to
market in record time

30. Personal, Communal, Public, Civic
• Personal
- Value we receive from being active instead of passive – doesn't
always involve give and take
- Creative instead of consumption
• Communal Sharing
-Take place inside a group of collaborators
- meetup.com
• Public
- Group of collaborators actively want to create a public resource –
Apache software
• Civic Sharing
- When a group is actively trying to transform a society
- Pink Chad/Sri Rame Sene – woman standing up for themselves in
India

31. Looking for the mouse
• This will be the future of human interactions
with screens. It will need a mouse attached to
it as we have come so accustomed to
operating in a media environment of sharing
and participating as opposed to pure
consumption (T.V)
- Its in our nature to interact and we enjoy it
- Also it gives us more freedom and in turn
domocratizes society