Gin, Television, and the Cognitive Surplus

What is cognitive surplus? Cognitive surplus is time people have when they are not performing any important tasks; "free time." Shirky's argument in this article focuses on the fact that being able to interact with, contribute to, and make use of the resources we possess to be able to be more literate today is extremely important. He makes the point that during our cognitive surplus, we waste any effort that should be contributed to the resources we have to become more involved and literate on activities such as television. He defines literacy as being able to create new ideas from ideas you have already developed, which is similar to the last two articles we went over.