CBC Radio’s Spark, hosted by Nora Young, interviewed Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and it’s really good. An edited interview aired in May 2008 but the full interview can be downloaded here in MP3 format.
Shirky describes his cognitive surplus concept in more detail. Put it this way: if you look at the millions and billions of hours of television watching time and could take a fraction of that to some good, interesting, or worthwhile work, you could do some amazing things.
Previous generations never had the benefit of a cognitive surplus, which comes from having more leisure time. They were too busy working to live.
If human brains were better at performing background tasks like the SETI data processing initiative, where your PC can be used to help crunch some of the data, I’d say this concept could really go a long way. It appears that we need things like:
where a lot of effort goes into building a work environment and dividing work up into smaller chunks, to really take advantage of this.
Awesome concept, though.
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