TECHNOLOGY: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected AgeBy Clay Shirky Allen Lane, 242pp, £20

THE WARNINGS were frequent and sustained, telling us that so much time spent in front of a glowing screen was damaging our ability to think clearly, and, worst of all, to interact with each other as humans. Children, in particular, were at risk from the addictive qualities of all that content.

The warnings were frequent and sustained, all right, but they didn’t make much difference – people still watch way too much television. Now, however, alarmist campaigns about the dangers of excessive time in front of the tube seem almost quaint – it has been superseded in the moral panic stakes by the internet, and the vast array of social media it has brought with it. Clay Shirky’s remarkable new book, however, hinges on a fundamental difference between the two – while one demands almost entirely passive consumption, the other encourages interaction and sharing.

In Shirky’s optimistic vision, that difference is the reason why the internet has the potential to tap the world’s great unused resource – the “cognitive surplus” created by our free time, the trillions of hours that were once spent passively consuming television, but which can now increasingly be put to constructive use. The free time occurred first, as post-war economies developed the 40-hour working week, but only now are the tools necessary to tap that resource widely available. As an example, Shirky cites the approximately 100 million hours of human thought that has gone into the creation of Wikipedia. And how much time is spent watching TV? “Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year. That represents about two thousand Wikipedia projects’ worth of free time annually,” Shirky writes. The internet has created a brave new world, and we’re only beginning to discern the possibilities.

Shirky is a lecturer at NYU, and a noted thinker about new technology, one of those writers often saddled with the label "internet guru". In his essays and talks, Shirky demonstrates an uncanny ability to predict the effects of the internet and social media, and his last book, Here Comes Everybody, was a delightful take on the power of crowdsourcing and online collaboration. In Cognitive Surplus, a sequel of sorts, he looks at how that power might best be utilised, and how to encourage socially beneficial online projects. While that sounds excessively worthy – and the title suggests a rather dull behavioural economics treatise – this is a fiercely compelling book, with barely a paragraph going by without some astute insight into the nature of our relationship with technology.

Shirky’s greatest strength is in identifying the historical precedents that have led to the current status quo, from Gutenberg economics of production to the behaviour of corporate media organisations, and exposing the common misconception that the status quo is the natural order of things, an error he describes as “mistaking an accidental pattern for a deeper truth”. “The people surprised at our new behaviours assume that behaviour is a stable category, but it isn’t,” he writes. “Human motivations change little over the years, but opportunity can change a little or a lot, depending on the social environment.” The internet has drastically changed that environment, so we now have numerous opportunities to fulfil our natural desires in a way that never existed before.

If there is a weakness in Shirky’s argument, it is that he glosses over the fact that the internet also facilitates selfish, antisocial and immoral natural desires, but there is an army of alarmist writers out there to remind us of that, most recently the likes of Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier.

Shirky’s natural optimism prefers to see how the internet can foster our natural creativity and generosity, with potentially limitless benefits to society. Crucially, while he is realistic about how this threatens plenty of existing economic models, including media from the music industry to newspapers, he is persuasive in arguing that the divide between professional content producer or service provider and the amateur consumer is a mere accident of economic history, and that we will all benefit from its collapse.

We are all being radically affected by this technological revolution, but Shirky has few peers when it comes to perceiving and articulating how we might be bettered by it. “The cognitive surplus, newly forged from previously disconnected islands of time and talent, is just raw material,” he writes. “We, collectively, aren’t just the source of the surplus, we are also the people designing its use.” After reading this book, there will be few who won’t share Shirky’s optimism, and few who won’t want to help design that better future.

Davin O’Dwyer is a freelance journalist