Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

Publishers still perform other functions in selecting, editing, and marketing work (dozens of people besides me have worked to improve this book, for example), but they no longer form the barrier between private and public writing.

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

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

Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity.

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.

When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same.

Because we have to coordinate with one another to get anything out of our shared free time and talents.

On the other hand, when someone buys a computer or a mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one.

Even though the spread of movable type created a massive downshift in average quality, that same invention made it possible to have novels, newspapers, and scientific journals.

But increasing freedom to participate in the public conversation has compensating values.