Cognitive Surplus?

One of the biggest misconceptions in policy is the idea that more widgets = desired policy outcome. So I am pleased by Farhad Manjoo's review of Clay Shirky's new book. First, a brief description of the book's central--and simple--thesis:

The time we might free up by ditching TV is Shirky’s “cognitive surplus” — an ocean of hours that society could contribute to endeavors far more useful and fun than television. With the help of a researcher at I.B.M., Shirky calculated the total amount of time that people have spent creating one such project, Wikipedia. The collectively edited online encyclopedia is the product of about 100 million hours of human thought, Shirky found. In other words, in the time we spend watching TV, we could create 2,000 Wikipedia-size projects — and that’s just in America, and in just one year.

Manjoo, however, points out that this might not exactly lead to an optimal outcome (remember T.E. Lawrence's quote about men who dream during the day):

The bigger problem is that, while making a convincing case for the social revolution that could come from our liberation from TV, Shirky seems to be telling just half the story. Nearly every one of his examples of online collectivism is positive; everyone here seems to be using the Internet to do such good things. Yet it seems obvious that not everything — and perhaps not even most things — that we produce together online will be as heartwarming as a charity or as valuable as Wikipedia. Other examples of Internet-abetted collaborative endeavors include the “birthers,” Chinese hacker collectives and the worldwide jihadi movement. In this way a “cognitive surplus” is much like a budgetary surplus — having one doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll spend it well. You could give up your time at the TV to do good things or bad; most likely you’ll do both.

Do people spend too much time watching TV? Probably. But the social problem of people not doing productive things with their free time isn't exactly that new. Depending on your social class, you might have spent the last few hundred years at the alehouse eyeing a risque dancer, bringing your in-laws to watch an auto-da-fe or a aristocrat losing his head on a nice sunny day, or to engaging in a spirited debate with the Scarlet Pimpernel over whose cravat was most tightly tied.

Not everyone is a Napoleon, a Goethe, or a Clay Shirky. And most people simply prefer having a place to socialize, have fun, relax, and be entertained to being mobilized as a vehicle for social revolution. And the idea that simply migrating people from one source of distraction to the other constitutes a sea change and the potential for increased output of beneficial things to society is a recipe for disappointment. Perhaps the best expression of this is a favorite Broadway song of mine.

It's true that the web has made cooperation much easier and less intensive (hence the phrase "slacktivism") but it's also not true as well that it also leads to greater output. We've already beaten the Iranian "Twitter Revolution" example to death but it's very pertinent.

What's more important is not liberating people from the tube but enabling small communities of creatives to get together in an easier manner. And that is a function that the Internet and social media already performs quite admirably. Imagine what Scharnhorst and his crew might have done if they had a Wiki or blogs? The French might have been in a right mess a lot sooner than 1870.

Comments

[Joseph Fouche]

Time spent annoying your cat with a digital camera to feed the LOLCat beast will expand to fill the time freed by skipping TV.

[A.E.]

Exactly! Now where is that damned critter?

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=11811251]

Fouche beat me to it. For every Wikipedia-style research project, there are about a million LOLcats, Encyclopedia Dramaticas, and (if you're REALLY old-school), "Mr. T Ate My Balls" homepages.

Of course, I don't think I would have entered blogging if I hadn't learned HTML making my very own Geocities Wing Commander page back in the 90s, so maybe it pans out.

[A.E.]

Wing Commander. What about Transformers?? That never interested you?