Political Implications of the Cognitive Surplus

Luigi Montanez serves up some commentary at techPresident that takes Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus theory and applies it to the online political world.

Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody explains "Cognitive Surplus".

Shirky posits, among other things, that Gin got humanity through the Industrial Revolution, and that today "Desperate Housewives" fills the same role.

Cognitive Surplus = Free Time

Of course it's more involved than that, and the ramifications are very important from an online political perspective when you look at the explosion in citizen involvement in politics ala the Obama campaign.

Basically, Shirky is saying that society is growing into interactive social media, and that this change away from one-way push media is going to become the dominant paradigm. Montanez extrapolates that out into a view of short-sided Beltway insiders talking about Obama's huge political supporter list only in terms of its ability to produce cash.

The real value, as Montanez cuts to, is the social network's ability to take action:

Political activism is no longer the domain of a few die-hard (and kind of weird) party activists and political junkies. As the Obama campaign has proven, it’s something within the grasp of all Americans, because with the help of social technologies political activism can now be on our own terms.