Clay Shirky: "How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World"

In Clay Shirky's, "How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World," he discuss how people should volunteer and contribute to large global world projects. Clay has some good points. He states that, surplus is made up of free time and talent. I think that if millions of people get together with different ideas something would come into form. If we have a lot of free time on our hands, why not use it for constructism? I found it interesting that  the world has over three trillion hours a year of free time. I'm inquiring, how did Mr. Shirky come up with that? Personally, I think that it depends on a person's schedule and lifestyle to determine how much free time one would have. Another interesting statement Clay Shirky made is, "There is a spectrum between mediocre and good." What I interpreted from that is, one have to start from the bottom to eventually improve. It takes practice. No matter what it is, doing something is better than doing nothing. If ideas are not put into action, one will never know what he/she can discover. For an example, the LOLcats. Clay did not declare the pictures of cats with quotes pointless. He stated that, "it is creative." I am witness of seeing pics as such surfacing the internet and I think, "What bored person in their free time create something like that?" However, Clay convinced me to be more open minded about creativity.  His statement, "technology is not only used to consume, but to share" supports this. Even though some things appear to be worthless, it is creative--intinsic motivation. The daycare scenario was also intriguing. One would think that parents would stop being late, because of the late fees applied. However, more parents start being late picking up their children. Overall Clay Shirky is pretty optimistic.