Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

Instead of being fed from above a limited diet of standardized cultural products, everyone — not just a minority of highly educated omnivores — can now craft a varied and customized cultural diet from the digital cornucopia. People create these customized diets by sharing the work of “curation” in differentiated niche taste communities. This colle

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Unlike other products of consumption, creativity is not a scarcity market, and writers have two main upsides to shared creativity:It helps them come up with new ideas - Because creativity doesn't strike in a snap of a finger, writers can't rely solely on their imagination for consistent content creation. They can't perceive the world in new ways an... See more

People like to consume media, but they also like to produce it ("Look what I made!") and share it ("Look what I found!").

Historically, most of our questions about the value of content have focused on the distribution side, rather than the production side. Today, the most interesting questions we can ask will focus on how content is made and maintained, and by whom. We’ve previously treated content as a first-copy cost problem, and have developed solutions like patent... See more