Look out! Here come the active consumers
Gin, Television and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky
This is an interesting essay that moots the idea that all the “interactive” stuff that’s appeared is a whole new way to deal with what Clay calls a “cognitive surplus” — which, as far as I can tell, basically means all the extra thinking a guy can do when he doesn’t have to work sixteen hours every day to live:
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.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
One could argue the same for the space program and the magnificent failure known as the 60s counterculture. Also, when you think about it, soaps are comfortable stories that provide an island of glamour and certainty in an increasingly unpredictable world. Gilligan and company would never get off the island; the goodies would always win out; the beautiful people lived beautiful lives and had beautiful problems.
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought… People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
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? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
Hence the explosion of blogs, social networking sites, forums, online gaming and of course Second Life. All of these offer the ability to participate, to give something back however minor. And this idea of everyone participating, creating media content, is something that folks simply aren’t used to yet — it’s still primarily the idea of Heap Big Broadcaster orating unto the passively receiving masses. The idea that the masses can now broadcast back is still surprising to them.
Of course, Sturgeon’s Law still applies.
Shirky has written a book, Here Comes Everybody, which discusses this phenomenon. He encapsulates it in a charming anecdote involving a four-year-old having a problem with a DVD movie. Some would shake their heads and mumble about the attention span of modern youth; but this is a child brought up with interactive media, used to the idea you can respond to it and have either it, or your fellow audience, or both, respond in turn; radically different to what even I was brought up with for most of my life.
Some proclaim the end of civilisation because of all this capacity for user-generated content, but I’ll leave the last word to Shirky.
However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
Posted in Articles (Occasionals,Links) by R Cruickshank 28/04/08 06:53 PM Tags: cosmic wisdom, links, occasional, philosophy
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