Book Review: Brains to Spare

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky  (Penguin Press, 2010)
 
What would you do if you had ten million hours of brain time to devote to a task? Would you create another Wikipedia? Would you debate every line of the U.S. health care overhaul? Or would you blow it all solving crossword puzzles and thinking up new lolcats.com captions? Shirky explores those questions in Cognitive Surplus as he reveals just how big a natural resource we possess.

Some of us have extra mental capacity — that’s always been true. But Shirky’s point is that we have a tremendous amount of collective brain power to spare as a result of the leisure time we’ve been accumulating over the eons.

We tend to waste this cognitive surplus watching television, but the advent of social media has given us a chance to deploy it, instead, in two fundamentally different ways: active participation in creating content instead of passively receiving broadcast news and entertainment; and working in concert with others, not individually. Shirky is convincing — and wickedly entertaining — when he argues that we now have the means, the motive, and the opportunity to rally around shared concerns. Deftly chosen examples, from singer Josh Groban’s fans to the open-source project Ushahidi, begin to show what’s possible. But the book’s real strength is in its call to arms — or call to brains — to solve problems on a scale not yet imagined.