The article "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus" by Clay Shirky is about cognitive surplus and how its better to do something than to do nothing. The main arguments that Shirky is making are that when war world II came around people had to start managing their free time. The act or process of knowing, preserving, and remembering was seen as an asset rather than a crisis. The author argues that this surplus or free time people have could be spent in better ways then watching TV, it could be used to share information on the computer through websites like wikipedia. This article defines literacy as the  ability to use the Internet to spread information, but to also be able to dig deep in to things and not just take it for face value. Shirky says that this is something society grows into not out of. This definition is somewhat like the other articles we read. Shirky repeats the words free time and cognitive surplus in his article a lot which shows me that the two words probably have a lot to do with each other.