Cognitive Surplus

  Jonah Lehrer has a nice post elaborating on his Barnes & Noble review of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. Like me, Lehrer finds alluring and valuable Shirky's central point, which is that the net is harnessing in constructive form a lot of time and energy that we appear to have been wasting watching TV. Yet Lehrer â who, unlike me, has read Shirky's book â finds that Shirky overplays his case, and that in his enthusiasm for networked contributions and collaborations he discounts both consumption and many offline interactions. He Lehrer mounts a convincing argument, and you really…