Clay Shirky (2005)Shirky compares the total time expended to build Wikipedia (ca. 100 million hours by 2008) with US yearly TV watching (200 billion hours), in his August 28 keynote at Wiki-Conference NYC.Cognitive surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age is the latest book by US writer and consultant Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at New York University. The book's thesis is that in most industrialized countries an increase in free time and improvements in education since World War II have been generating a huge "cognitive surplus", defined as the aggregate of educated people's "free time". While this potential has so far mostly been wasted on watching television, in our "connected age" modern communication tools enable us to put it to a much more productive use, by collaborating for mutual and societal benefit.
Wikipedia is a prime example of such a collaboration, and Shirky was one of its earliest observers: In his April 2003 talk "A group is its own worst enemy", where he warned of the fundamental group dynamics that tend to threaten online communities, he singled out Wikipedia as a group that had avoided such threats. In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, Wikipedia figures as a key example. (Shirky has been on the Wikimedia Foundation's Advisory Board since 2007 and was consulted for the WMF's Strategic Planning project.) In Cognitive surplus, Wikipedia is less prominent, but the book is filled with insights, anecdotes and research results that make it an excellent read for Wikimedians who want to reflect on the successes and challenges of the Foundation's projects.
