Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age [精裝]

"Clay Shirky may be the finest thinker we have on the internet revolution." Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You and Emergence" "Clay has long been one of my favorite thinkers on all things internet---not only is he smart and articulate, but he's one of those people who is able to crystallize the half-formed ideas that I've been trying to piece together into glittering, brilliant insights that make me think, yes, of course, that's how it all works" Cory Doctorow, coeditor of Boing Boing and author of Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present" "Shirky writes cleanly and convincingly about the intersection of technological innovation and social change; he makes both the science and the sociology accessible" New York Observer" "[Shirky] looks at self-organization with an academic's eye, tinged by an appreciation of the commerce that underlies a fair amount of the Internet." The Seattle Times" "In story after story, Clay masterfully makes the connections as to why business, society and our lives continue to be transformed by a world of net-enabled social tools. His pattern-matching skills are second to none." Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Chief Software Architect." "The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world" "In Cognitive Surplus, internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last." "Since Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time---what Shirky calls a "cognitive surplus." But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion's share of it. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allows us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mindexpanding---reference tools like Wikipedia---to life-saving-like Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to report on acts of violence in real time." "Shirky charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus---aided by new technologies---will have on twenty-first-century society and how we can best exploit those effects. For instance, he acknowledges that new tech brings greater freedom to publish and hence lower quality on average. But it also allows for the sort of experimentation that produces our greatest innovations. Shirky also assesses the transformative impact of online culture, which is by definition more transparent than traditional management structures." The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. Wikipedia, which was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year, is only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before.