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Cognitive Surplus and the Wisdom of the Crowd

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Clay Shirky's theory of "Cognitive Surplus" looks to the positives that the internet has to offer - primarily, the ability to bring people together to achieve something much greater using their free time productively. Shirky believes that seemingly insignificant creations are still valid contributions, regardless of how "irrelevant" they are. In addition to this, Shirky also believes that technology has the potential to be used to benefit individuals and society through collaborative means, such as "Crowd-sourcing."

Coined by Jeff Howe of "Wired Magazine", (Safire, 2009) crowd-sourcing is an "online, distributed problem-solving and production model" (Brabham, 2008, p.76) wherein an organisation reaches out to the online community to aid them in the production of a project. Daren Brabham describes crowd-sourcing as a "sweet spot between organisations and online communities" (Brabham, 2013) and discusses the positive and negative aspects of crowd-sourcing throughout his works.

In this website, I will review and discuss the similarities between Shirky's views and knowledge on the internet and his theory of "Cognitive Surplus" with Brabham's views and knowledge of "Crowd-sourcing," with specific reference to various additional third party sources such as "James Surowiecki" and his theory of "The Wisdom of Crowds".

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