New addition my vocabulary: Cognitive surplus

Cognitive surplus is the free time Americans have on their hands to engage in collaborative activities. The article is stating that although the Internet can be incredibly helpful with retrieving information, it is also damaging our cognitive process of making knowledge thoughts our own. Shrink is making the claim that our attention span is shortened now a days and our patience is fried. This article defines literacy as the intentional reading and writing done by a person that involves depth and pure focus and patience. The term “literacy” in this article relates back heavily to the previous articles. The terms are relatively the same. The article involves lots of repetition throughout, but one important phrase that caught my eye was “free time”. Coming into the article, I thought it would fall under the same categories as the previous articles and in a way, it did. But, it also provided new background on how Americans perceived free time and what cognitive surplus really is. The repetition reinforces that idea by using it time and time again. Americans use their free time to scrape the surface of information, and give no time into depth and deep comprehension.