Hugo Chavez gets a Twitter account.

• Author: Caryl, Christian
• Position: "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website", "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy", "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom" and "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age" - Book review

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website (New York: Crown, 2011), 304 pp., $23.00.

David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 352 pp., $15.99.

Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 432 pp., $27.95.

Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 256 pp., $25.95.

The United States has always been a nation of technological optimists. From Jefferson to Edison to the 1939 World's Fair, giddiness over gadgetry is as American as apple pie. Benjamin Franklin refused to patent his inventions in the belief that he was creating public goods. Buckminster Fuller leapt from designing radical new structures like the energy-efficient and easy-to-construct Dymaxion

House to the conclusion that "selfishness is unnecessary"--and dismissed it as the product of irrational minds. Surely it is no coincidence that our country has also produced generals who pronounced that wars could be won through the sole use of airpower or central bankers who were convinced that they had vanquished risk through fancy mathematical algorithms. Our faith in engineering has a habit of sliding over into our idealism about society.

The creation of the Internet produced a vast swath of fertile new territory for those who believe that progress in technology equates with progress, full stop. Visions of direct democracy, power to the people, danced in activists' heads. The technology itself might have been new, but the talk about newness was entirely old hat. When the founder of MIT'S Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, declared in his 1995 book Being Digital that "a new generation is emerging from the digital landscape free of many of the old prejudices" and that "digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony," he ended up sounding more like a creaky Wilsonian than a fresh-faced rebel. The dot-com collapse at the end of the 1990s soon derailed some of the more grandiose predictions (especially the ones about the impending dawn of an economy freed from the burden of bricks and mortar). And talk of global harmony suddenly seemed rather outre after al-Qaeda's attacks on the United States.

But history must always take another turn, and now revolution is sweeping the Middle East--powerfully abetted, it would appear, by the very same networks that finally seem to be delivering on their radically transformational promise. Not that long ago we were labeling revolutions by color; now we give them the names of Silicon Valley companies. Surely the inevitability-of-human-progress-through-technology skeptics got it wrong?

If you believe Clay Shirky, the basic story goes something like this: We human beings are group animals. We are naturally prone to "generous, social, and creative behavior," so the Internet will bring out the best in us. The rise of social media means that a densely interconnected world must necessarily be a happier one. No longer will we sit passively before our television sets. Now we can engage in active participation with our peers, forging communities without regard to geography or cost. "This increase in our ability to create things together, to pool our free time and particular talents into something useful, is one of the great new opportunities of the age, one that changes the behaviors of people who take advantage of it."

Shirky, an expert on social media at New York University, believes all of this quite firmly. So he decided to indulge in a classic Web 2.0 response: he sat down and wrote a book. But fine, fair enough. There's no reason why books shouldn't have a place in a networked world--even if the only sharing that they offer is a strictly one-way street, imperious author declaiming to mute and worshipful reader.

This is but one of several ironies that come to mind as you make your way through Cognitive Surplus, Shirky's new book on the possibilities of social media. The title refers to the enormous social capital that can now be tapped as we push back our recliners and step away from the television set to the computer in the next room. No longer will we be content in our old roles as passive consumers. Now we can band together in all sorts of unexpected ways to create new public projects--from sites where people converge to think up mindless captions for cat pictures to more serious efforts like Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing site in Kenya that aggregates reports about acts of violence committed against critics of the...