Clay Shirky and The Cognitive Surplus
Filed Under: SF Business, Science, Top Post
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?
