Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

Many of the unexpected uses of communications tools are surprising because our old beliefs about human nature were so lousy.

But what if, all this time, providing professional content isn’t the only job we’ve been hiring media to do?

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

As long as the assumed purpose of media is to allow ordinary people to consume professionally created material, the proliferation of amateur-created stuff will seem incomprehensible.

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.

The wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource, and lets us design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource.

Participation is inherent in the phone, and it’s the same for the computer. When you buy a machine that lets you consume digital content, you also buy a machine to produce it.

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

The easier it is for the average person to publish, the more average what gets published becomes.