"How Have You Deployed Your Own Cognitive Surplus?"

More Intelligent Life posts the above video of YouTube user Peter Oakley and muses:

YouTube is sometimes hounded for being the natural product of all of our most craven instincts. Instead of watching quality programming on television, say, we are all narcissistically posting videos of our dancing babies and puking cats in the hopes of becoming famous. Though Joel Budd at The Economist makes a convincing case for television's sustained hegemony, it's clear that something more interesting is going on here. The promise of an audience is enough to motivate most anyone to take out a camera and capture something (Anne Trubek made a similar argument for blogging and writing). People are creating work and engaging with each other. The result is that everyone becomes a producer, not just a consumersomething that Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink consider in this insightful conversation in the latest issue of Wired.