Another book report

It might be something like weight-lifting for reading skills, but after gnawing at the almost over-formal, academic style of The Anatomy of Buzz and the more technically precise style of The Design of Everyday Things, I felt like I snarfed Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky.

The proverbial meat-n-potatoes of the book is that the era of passive entertainment--primarily television--was largely an aberration, and that people are intrisically motivated to create, collaborate and share. The permutations of these motivations provide much of the content after the preface. What I thought to be the take-aways for the software developer--web and mobile developers in particular--were these:

• Passive entertainment will not die; it will, however, have to compete with the desire of people to control their own experience with the larger world. Things as diverse as LOLCats, Napster, citizen journalism, political protest coordination, open-source software, etc. are driven by such motivations.
• Because such motivations are intrinsic--i.e. come from inside--they cannot be effectively bought-and-paid-for. Co-opting such motivation must be done with great care, and can turn on the co-opters with a vengeance.
  
• Technological revolutionaries will not accurately predict the full effects of their creations; neither will those with a vested interest in the status quo.
• How people will interact with technology (for personal or public good) is largely directed by the opportunities it affords them, rather than the intent--in other words, enter the Law of Unintended Consequences.
• Scaling from a few dozen members of a network to a few thousand must be managed with extreme attention to the nuances of the underlying culture.
  
• The proliferation of networked technology (computers and cellphones) combined with the trillions of hours of available free time can not be spoken of in Utopian terms. YouTube can be used to post inane cat videos or pirated content just as easily as footage that could topple a dictatorship or bring corruption to light.
  

My only complaint was a certain degree of self-promotion that riles the Upper Midwest's ethos of modesty bordering on self-effacement, i.e. the ethos under which I was raised (albeit perhaps not with entire success). Overall, however, the examples are lucid and entertaining, and Shirky's style is eminently readable. In other words, more than worth the few hours of a programmer's time.