Go read Cognitive Surplus, the new book by Clay Shirky, author of the equally excellent Here Comes Everybody. I briefly referenced the book in my column on Zynga, and I took a somewhat un-Shirky-like view. As a general rule, however, Shirky is the sharpest observer of media and culture to have emerged in the last ten years. To get a sense of the book’s argument, I recommend reading Cory Doctorow’s glowing review.

But the meat of the argument is about how the best explanation for many of the group phenomena we see online, from ICanHazCheezburger to Wikipedia, is that people like sharing with each other and collaborating. Not always, of course. But there are architectures of participation that encourage the kind of sharing and generosity that enriches us all, and by experimenting with them, we can create media and social change that harnesses millions of people to help and amuse each other.
Shirky is very good on the connection between trivial entertainments and serious business, from writing web-servers to changing government. Lolcats aren’t particularly virtuous examples of generosity and sharing, but they are a kind of gateway drug between zero participation and some participation. The difference between “zero” and “some” being the greatest one there is, it is possible and even likely that lolcatters will go on, some day, to do something of more note together.

One of the most compelling arguments in the book is that much of our thinking about generational sensibilities is hopelessly muddled. Emily Nussbaum wrote the definite New York article on the privacy norms of Generation Y. Yes as Shirky argues, there’s a simple reason why teenagers in the 1980s didn’t overshare on Facebook: there was no Facebook. Given the opportunity to share, and to overshare, in earlier eras, the world would have looked very different.

I have no reason to believe that Shirky is a libertarian per se, but Cognitive Surplus is a powerful argument for a freer society that embraces experiments in living and doing. Truly an inspiring, exceptionally smart, richly informative book, particularly for those who are unfamiliar with Shirky’s core insights.