The main gist of Clay Shirky‘s latest book, Cognitive Surplus, is that amazing things are now possible since society is waking up from its television-induced stupor of the last 60 years. The industrial age and media shift of the 1950s gave us skads of free time — a cognitive surplus — but we weren’t ready and didn’t have the mechanisms, in general, to do anything good with it. So we became couch potatoes. Now, with the emergence of a social web, collaboration and connection as possibilities, the world awaits our good deeds.