What Do We Do With this New “Cognitive Surplus”?

BoingBoing points us to a thought-provoking argument made by Clay Shirky about the idea of “cognitive surplus” and the ways we spend (or waste) it. Shirky, a professor at NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), contends that the rise of automation in the 20th century has resulted in an increase of free time and mental space which could be used for thinking or creating, but which we have grown accustomed to spending zoned out in front of the television screen. Shirky goes on to argue that the ways we used to spend the cognitive surplus (watching sitcoms and other light entertainment) are being replaced by new, more proactive ways - like writing Wikipedia articles or contributing other forms of user-generated content. But the revolution is still (only slowly )underway: with the help of some complicated equations and a friend from IBM, Shirky shows that the amount of “human thought” that we Americans expend watching television is still some 2,000 times that of the “human thought” units we use in contributing to all the Wikipedia articles in the world. But with the gradual demise of traditional forms of passive entertainment, the argument goes, we will find ourselves with a growing cognitive surplus to consume - and participate - in new ways. Shirky maintains that this rise of participation is what we should be following; even the creation of something as seemingly pointless as lolcats is more participatory, and thus more valuable, he says, than the time we might have spent watching the Skipper’s antics in “Gilligan’s Island”:

Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change…

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it?…The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.

It’s a compelling argument, but we’re not quite sure if we agree completely with Shirky’s contention that in all cases, “doing something is better than doing nothing” and that watching sitcoms is always “doing nothing” (how can you really compare the value of watching, say, a classic episode of “I Love Lucy” (the nostalgia! the simple pleasure of clean, screwball comedy!) to that of adding another lolcat photo to one’s lolcat collection? how can you ascribe any objective value on either of these experiences for all people?). Regardless, Shirky brings to light a provocative point - one which the old guard of the media and entertainment worlds, whether they like it or not, must reckon with.

Clay Shirky: Gin, Sitcoms and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody