Spending Some of My Surplus.

The Strib is running a commentary by me about flying the flag. Here's another part of the back story...

Last month, I read Jim's post about how he responded to coming across a homeless person's camp.

This morning I went downtown and signed up for a volunteer gig at a homeless shelter.

It struck a chord. He runs a business and has two small kids, not to mention an esoteric set of other interests. What's my excuse?

I shot him an email and asked for the name of the place and if it needed other volunteers. It turns out, People Serving People has an online form, and within the week, I'd sent it in, completed a tour and signed up for one morning a week in the children's center.

Since I run into Jim occasionally at his shop, it's very remotely possible I might've eventually heard a story about his volunteering. And then I might've gotten around to doing more than congratulating him for being a good guy. But the internet and the communication it enables — both intimate and transactional — deserves a lot of credit for getting me into my own volunteer gig.

Clay Shirky talks about the "cognitive surplus" created by our current accidental prosperity and the web putting us on the cusp of "the greatest expansion of expressive capability the world has ever known."

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

Some of us may spend that surplus time gaming or creating YouTube parodies, while others will innovate in unpredictable ways.

We also have the option of saying, why am I sitting here pecking and clicking about change?