What Motivates Us

In his new book, Clay Shirky says that what we do with our free time is changing: from passive TV watching to active online engagement, we are motivated by a desire for self-fulfillment. In an interview with Wired Magazine, Shirky says, “Somehow, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. But once we stop thinking of all that time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world’s educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource. It’s what I refer to as the cognitive surplus.”