Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

Creating the most value from a tool involves not master plans or great leaps forward but constant trial and error.

We’re lousy at predicting what we will do with new communications tools before we try them.

We can now turn massive aggregations of small contributions into things of lasting value. This fact, key to our current era, has been a persistent surprise. At every turn, skeptical observers have attacked the idea that pooling our cognitive surplus could work to create anything worthwhile.

Systems that assume people will act in ways that create public goods, and that give them opportunities and rewards for doing so, often let them work together better than neoclassical economics would predict.

When we assume people are principally selfish, we design systems that reward selfish people.

Behavioral economics is demonstrating that humans don’t always act in self-interested ways, and that transactions themselves have an emotional component.

The hothouse environment of a collaborative circle can make the ideas and achievements of the participants develop faster than if the participants were all pursuing the identical goals without sharing.

Every surprising bit of new behavior described here has two common elements: people had the opportunity to behave in a way that rewarded some intrinsic motivation, and those opportunities were enabled by technology but created by human beings. Those bits of new behavior, though, are extensions of, rather than replacements for, much older patterns o... See more

Many of our behaviors are like memorizing phone numbers, held in place not by desire but by inconvenience, and they’re quick to disappear when the inconvenience does. Getting news from a piece of paper, having to be physically near a television at a certain time to see a certain show, keeping our vacation pictures to ourselves as if they were some ... See more