Brave New Films

One of the more intriguing concepts making the rounds of late is Clay Shirky's notion of the "cognitive surplus." The cognitive surplus represents what we do in all the time we don't spend fully immersed in work. During the industrial revolution, as people moved from backbreaking agricultural labor to 8-hour days in factories, they turned to drink. Today's answer is television, and increasingly, the Internet.

More and more, the cognitive surplus no longer means sitting back and getting sloshed (though there's that too), and television's hold on an Internet generation is gradually waning. The cognitive surplus is now coming to be defined by the time we spend creating content and interacting online. When asked by a TV person "where do people find the time?" to edit Wikipedia, Shirky's answer was pretty direct. With a fellow academic, he did back-of-the-envelope math revealed that all the edits to Wikipedia to date represented 100 million hours of human effort -- as compared to the 200 billion hours a year Americans spend watching television. The Internet is stealing from the hide for TV -- and not soon enough.

Over the last few days, it's dawned on me that the cognitive surplus can also explain part of the divide in left-right online activity, at least at an institutional and leadership level.