Clay Shirky, who I have mentioned a couple of times on this blog already, has a new book out. I haven’t read the book yet–and to be honest, I don’t think I’ll find the time–but his idea of cognitive surplus seems like an interesting one to explore. Wired gave a brief description of his book this way:

He argues that the time Americans once spent watching television has been redirected toward activities that are less about consuming and more about engaging—from Flickr and Facebook to powerful forms of online political action. And these efforts aren’t fueled by external rewards but by intrinsic motivation—the joy of doing something for its own sake.

So people, Shirky says, are getting up off the couch and doing things. All sorts of things. Here’s an example Shirky gives in the same Wired article:

We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, for example, using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor. That’s a lot of time. But remember: Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year.

The human mind, as we all know, has a lot of trouble thinking about numbers that big so Information is Beautiful gives it to us as a visual:

Not what you were expecting? Suddenly, the amount of time required to accomplish something huge (I think Wikipedia can safely be described as huge) seems small compared to the time people dedicate to a leisure activity. Imagine, if a small portion of that 200 billion hours was dedicated toward creative thinking about important problems or issues, we might hear about stories like this more often:

Six weeks ago, Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, received a late-night call from an apologetic “mystery plumber.” The caller said he had a sketch for how to solve the problem at the bottom of the Gulf. It was a design for a containment cap that would fit snugly over the top of the failed blowout preventer at the heart of the Gulf oil spill.

Professor Bea, a former Shell executive and well-regarded researcher, thought the idea looked good and sent the sketches directly to the US Coast Guard and to a clearinghouse set up to glean ideas from outside sources for how to cap the stubborn Macondo well.

When Bea saw the design of the containment cap lowered onto the well last week, he marveled at its similarity to the sketches from the late-night caller, whose humble refusal to give his name at the time nearly brought Bea to tears. (read the rest of this story at the Christian Science Monitor here)

Check out Clay Shirky’s TED talk: