Foster Hagey

I’ve been reading Clay Shirky’s newest book – Cognitive Surplus. It basically says, we’ve wasted a bunch of time watching TV for the past 60 years. I don’t know about you, but I would consider my time watching South Park as time well spent, but clearly I don’t need to watch the reruns when they are on.

The clearest example of the Cognitive Surplus is Wikipedia; which Shirky says has taken about 100 million hours of human work to build. He then goes on to say that the US population collectively spends two billion hours per year watching TV; which is roughly 20 times the amount of time required to create wikipedia. There are other examples of Cognitive Surplus like the open source projects Linux and the Apache web server, and many other projects that are organized around the intrinsic motivations of the participants rather than extrinsic motivations.

Here is another great TED talk by Dan Pink that explains how the intrinsic motivators of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose are far better motivators than the extrinsic motivators of Carrots and Sticks.