Clay's no longer on silk, but I found this an "aha" read, and good
discussion fodder nonetheless.
Udhay
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008009.html
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
WorldChanging Team
May 7, 2008 10:18 AM
by Clay Shirky
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in
the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical
technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are
amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London.
And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate
with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and
museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a
lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus,
one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to
get what we think of now as an industrial society.
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.
And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that
we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a
crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that
surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in
everybody's basement.
This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in
the introduction, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody,
which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a
conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV
producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me,
"What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"
I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may
remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years
ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The
talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the
whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change
in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the
article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth
planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the
edge of the solar system."
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a
conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That
wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and
said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just
kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that
question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the
cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
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.
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 100 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 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.
The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the
phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. 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.
The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and
lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails
informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near
where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.
Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple
of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a
professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map
for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if
there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a
push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you
start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.
Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town
has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous.
Don't go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark." But it's
something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to
say there's no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the
cops, if they have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In
fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was,
"This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's
actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and
get it from the authorities who might have it now."
Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social
software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But
the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one
succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point
already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools,
has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus,
enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill
of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined
existing even five years ago.
So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or,
rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was
another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this
same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of
Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was
thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be
elves."
At least they're doing something.
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get
off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw
that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every
half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my
blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had
an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those
things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it
was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big
surprise. 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.
And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do
something than to do nothing. 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.
This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media
in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can
we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll
consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes.
But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People
like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the
previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something
interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the
opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer.
It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs
on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.
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.
I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?
Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she
was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was
essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the
flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and
produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually
realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and
settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the
case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the
industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.
I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of.
It's the sort of thing that society grows into. But I'm not sure she
believed me, in part because she didn't want to believe me, but also in
part because I didn't have the right story yet. And now I do.
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one
of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter
watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she
jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems
like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is
really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She
started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you
doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said,
"Looking for the mouse."
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a
mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's
targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still
for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way
change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply
in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that
I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching
Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming,
producing and sharing.
It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when
I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy
this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in
this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out
the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them:
We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a
reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been
served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves,
"If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it
here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.
Thank you very much.
Clay Shirky is the author of the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of
Organizing Without Organizations. Here Comes Everybody is about what
happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without
needing traditional organizational structures. You can order the book
here. Along with the book, Clay has launched a Here Comes Everybody
blog, designed to both chronicle and extend the themes of the book
(which you can buy here).
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
