In his TED Talk, Clay Shirky considers what he sees as what will change the world -- cognitive surplus. He defines cognitive surplus as the free time each of us spends on collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, Ushahidi, and LOLcats. He encourages everyone to spend their time on projects of civic value: projects that benefit humanity.
Shirky does a good job explaining his ideas, but the ideas themselves are not well formed and quite vague. He does not explain the application of his ideas. I agree the cognitive surplus could have large benefits.When many minds come together there can be a huge amount of information available. This can be seen especially on Wikipedia where there is a well written article on almost any topic. I can also see the affect of a large amount of minds thinking together in our class' fishbowls. We learn much more about topics from fishbowls than just thinking on our own. Since the way each person thinks is unique, each person see things in different ways opening up huge possibilities. As Shirky says, "no one person knows what everyone knows." I can see this concept working very well in companies where there could be some sort of collaborative time when employees could work together to develop new product ideas and improving products. Also, this concept could work on wikis that consider ideas to help the poor or war-torn countries. This concept the Shirky brings up is a very good one, but not completely developed.
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