Continuing on the thoughts of yesterday’s post, I’ve recently read Clay Shirky’s speech, “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” You can read a tran­script of it, or watch a video. I highly rec­om­mend check­ing out one or the other and com­ing back here. I’ll wait. For the lazy, here”s a choice bit that explains much of it:

If I had to pick the crit­i­cal tech­nol­ogy for the 20th cen­tury, the bit of social lubri­cant with­out which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enter­prise, I’d say it was the sit­com. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, ris­ing edu­ca­tional attain­ment, ris­ing life expectancy and, crit­i­cally, a ris­ing num­ber of peo­ple who were work­ing five-day work weeks. For the first time, soci­ety forced onto an enor­mous num­ber of its cit­i­zens the require­ment to man­age some­thing they had never had to man­age before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watch­ing TV.

…

And this is the other thing about the size of the cog­ni­tive sur­plus we’re talk­ing about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ram­i­fi­ca­tions. Let’s say that every­thing stays 99 per­cent the same, that peo­ple watch 99 per­cent as much tele­vi­sion as they used to, but 1 per­cent of that is carved out for pro­duc­ing and for shar­ing. The Internet-connected pop­u­la­tion watches roughly a tril­lion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. con­sump­tion. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

Pretty cool, huh? I think Clay is describ­ing the under­ly­ing force behind the New York Times arti­cle from yes­ter­day. The cog­ni­tive sur­plus is lead­ing to many peo­ple using the time for­merly soaked up by the one-way media to cre­ate things them­selves, and to share them. Which causes a glut in the choices for actu­ally con­sum­ing, and results in the para­dox of choice. Making things col­lab­o­ra­tively like Wikipedia makes us happy, but hav­ing all those other options makes us unhappy. Another para­dox, of sorts.

Wikipedia is a bit of a dif­fer­ent from, say, writ­ing fan fic­tion, because Wikipedia has a core use­ful­ness that is more broad in appeal. You could say that Wikipedia pro­vides a clear ben­e­fit to soci­ety, whereas the ben­e­fit to soci­ety of more fic­tion, or more music, or more pho­tog­ra­phy is less read­ily appar­ent. I’m not say­ing that your X-Files/Evil Dead crossover fan­fic doesn’t pro­vide a ben­e­fit. I just think it’s harder to make the case for it. I’m not going to do it for you, anyway.

The real mind blower here for me is this idea of think­ing about the cog­ni­tive surplus–not think­ing about it as leisure time, but think­ing about it as hours spent think­ing. That sur­plus has always existed, but some­thing about the Internet has pro­vided an entirely new means of tap­ping into it. Sure, some have cho­sen to express their sur­plus by launch­ing flame wars over which Doctor was the best (clearly the 7th), but I think Shirky is right in point­ing out that this is all embry­onic still. We’re going to see some amaz­ing things soon. What forms will they take? My think­ing along these lines before was lim­ited to the idea of crowd­sourc­ing, but I’m start­ing to see that it’s so much more than that. I really need to read Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.

What prob­lems can we solve using the inter­net and our cog­ni­tive surplus?

Tagged as: Clay Shirky, Social Surplus, television, Wikipedia