Edge 255 - Clay Shirky on GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS

There is an interesting talk by Clay Shirky on the new edition of Edge. Some highlights from the talk:

Tim O'Reilly and his initial skepticism on "Social Software":

"In November 2002, Clay Shirky organized a "social software summit," based on the premise that we were entering a "golden age of social software... greatly extending the ability of groups to self-organize."

I was skeptical of the term "social software" at the time. The explicit social software of the day, applications like friendster and meetup, were interesting, but didn't seem likely to be the seed of the next big Silicon Valley revolution".

And of course, this being Tim O'Reilly, an extremely intelligent guy, he is not afraid to admit he was short sighted and that, indeed, Social Software did change the internet landscape for good:

"Now, five years after Clay's social software summit, Facebook, an application that explicitly explores the notion of the social network, has captured the imagination of those looking for the next internet frontier. I find myself ruefully remembering my skeptical comments to Clay after the summit, and wondering if he's saying "I told you so.""

Shirky elaborates on what he calls "the cognitive surplus", or the power of individuals and crowds to create new applications or find new uses for existing ones:

"So how big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 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 98 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. 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 the cognitive surplus that's finally being dragged into what Tim O'Reilly 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, 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".

Much to think about in terms of how to get people interested in changing the way they spend that cognitive surplus. For us working in creative fields, it is always a matter of how to get people engaged and involved. How do we better give everyone the tools to take advantage of that cognitive surplus?