How Do You Use Your Cognitive Surplus?

Clay Sharky has written a blog post which is essentially a transcript of his much discussed presentation earlier this week at the Web 2.0 Expo. His talk discussed the transformation of media and how individuals are being transformed in to media participants after existing only as media consumers for the past 30 years. One of the core components of the discussion surrounds the following statement: Media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. [This is in contrast to media in the 20th century which was run as a single race--consumption.] And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus [a cognitive surplus] and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less. Clay proceeds to jump into some back of the envelope calculations on total cognitive expenditure by humans via television and compares that quantitatively to the shift toward participatory media. One of those calculations concludes that if 1 percent of all time spent consuming television worldwide is used on participatory media, there is enough cognitive energy to generate 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year. As Clay Sharky states, the concept of "I can do that, too--is a big change." Andrew Keen is somewhat accurate when he complains (in "Cult of the Amateur") that the quality of media being created by individuals is not on the same level of the media being produced by the professional media. While all the media being generated by users is not necessarily "good media", it is still better than traditional media that has been given to us simply for consumption and nothing else. Rather than spending our "cognitive surplus" on just the consumption of alcohol and television as we have over the past century, this century will have an increase in people using their cognitive surplus toward new media creation. Is this going to create the downfall of traditional journalism and media? Not completely. I'm still going to enjoy a good television show (even if it doesn't come to me via the television), but I'm also going to spend a lot more time participating (as I do with this blog). Given the shift of cognitive surplus allocations, how do you plan on using yours?

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How Do You Use Your Cognitive Surplus?

Nick O'Neill

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Nick O'Neill