This is Tech

At this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, Clay Shirky gave an entertaining talk on how the ‘Cognitive Surplus’, or the collective spare brain power of everyone, is shifting from passive to more active engagement.

…We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

(Via Tim Lauer.)