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Here's your SCUP Link to "Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution"

Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink, authors, respectively, of the books - Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age - are interviewed for Wired magazine. The conversation was "about motivation and media, social networking, sitcoms, and why the hell people spend their free time editing Wikipedia." Free time you ask? Well, there are people who have some, especially those (like me) who watch no television. What Shirky and Pink talk about is how that time is now "put to use" instead of "used up." 

A thought-stimulating, brief interview:

Shirky: We’re still in the very early days. So far, it’s largely young people who are exploring the alternatives, but already they are having a huge impact. 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.

Pink: Amazing. All the time that people devote to Wikipedia—which that guy considered weird and wasteful—is really a tiny portion of our worldwide cognitive surplus. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.

Shirky: And it represents a very different and very powerful type of motivation.

Pink: Exactly. Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it’s pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.