On average, teenagers spend 30 hours a week watching TV, spend 4 hours a day on the computer, and play 2 hours a day of video games. Imagine how good your grade would be if you spent that much time studying! According to Clay Shirky, there are over a trillion hours a year of free time, including the time we spend on TV and computers. This is time that goes unused, time that is unproductive. Not just a million, or even a billion but a TRILLION. If someone works for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and take one week off a year, they will work about 2040 hours a year. It would take 490,196,078 people to work for 2040 hours to reach a trillion hours. If you think about how make people are in the world, that's really not that many and yet, we still have a trillion hours of free time. But within that free time, there is something that is being created, cognitive surplus.
Cognitive surplus is the work we do online and share with the world in our spare time. Right now, you could be thinking, on Facebook I share information with the world when i post status'! Does that mean I'm part of cognitive surplus? Well, not exactly. In order to be a part of cognitive surplus, you need to volunteer and work together with others on large projects that may even affect the world. You need to use your hours of free time and use creativity and share with the world. Shirky talks about an example he gives of a woman in Kenya. This woman started blogging aout events happening in Kenya, then many people started commenting on it and contriuting to it ut she couldn't keep up with it. Blog readers saw that she needed help and reached out. They realized that they could find a program to keep up with it. That program was called Ushahidi. Ushahidi became such a big hit and so many people used it, that they decided to make open-source. It is now used in many countries today. This is just one of the many examples of cognitive surplus in the world.
Inventing Facebook is another example of Cognitive Surplus. Mark Zuckerberg created a social networking site that is now used by hundreds of people all over the world. There is now an easy way to get information from person to person. There are groups that give information about world issues that you can join if you are interested in finding out information about them, and so many other things that would have been considered impossible 20 years ago. When Mark started this website, he was not expecting to get one penny from it, he did it because he liked to work with internet and computers. He volunteered his free time to put something out there for others to use.
The general message that Clay Shirky is trying to get across is that if we design to give because we like it, our society can get so far in the world. It has been proven in so many studies that more can be accomplished when people do things because they ENJOYED them not because they were getting paid to do it. "We need human generosity and technology," says Shirky. With these two things, we can lead our society to a future filled with many successes and learn more about the world every day. Every person in the world should try and put something forward. Even if it doesn't work, at least we can say we tried to add something to our world and future.
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