{"id":429,"date":"2008-04-28T11:01:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-28T15:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=429"},"modified":"2009-01-14T22:24:30","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T02:24:30","slug":"clay-shirkys-cognitive-surplus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=429","title":{"rendered":"Clay Shirky&#8217;s Cognitive Surplus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><lj user=\"minnehaha\"> sent me a pointer to an article by <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Clay_Shirky\">Clay               Shirky<\/a> about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.herecomeseverybody.org\/2008\/04\/looking-for-the-mouse.html\">the               &#8220;cognitive surplus&#8221;\u2014excess brainpower not needed               for making a living<\/a>. Thought-provoking in the extreme; read               it if you haven&apos;t already. Shirky&apos;s thesis is that free time created               by postwar productivity gains have been sopped up by watching TV,               and if we watched only a little less TV and deployed that wasted               brain-time in collaborative projects, wow! The things we could do!               I&apos;m short on time today, so I&apos;ll post a few quick observations on               the article and the idea here, in the hope for more general conversation:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The consequences of the invention of gin are very well covered                 by Colin Wilson in his book <i>A Criminal History of Mankind<\/i>.                 The problem was not solved for 200 years\u2014the urban poor drinking                 themselves to death was the primary reason for Prohibition\u2014and                 it&apos;s still not entirely clear to me how it was solved. My guess:                 Universal education and technology (think TV) allowed the poor                 to entertain themselves in less destructive ways.<\/li>\n<li>Do we really watch two billion hours of TV every year, or are                 TVs simply <i>on<\/i> for two billion hours? In many households,                 TVs provide a sort of background noise to prevent too much disturbing                 silence, but how much attention is paid to the box is a lot more                 difficult to measure, and I suspect Big Media would prefer that                 no one try.<\/li>\n<li>TV is often watched for the many but very small time slices                 that it takes to catch the news or weather. Carol and I watch                 very little TV but The Weather Channel, and we watch it in small                 chunks of a few minutes a few times a day. It adds up, but converting                 those dispersed minutes into productive brain-time may not be                 possible. The problem here is not a shortage of time but a shortage                 of <i>focus<\/i>, which is a separate and worthy discussion.<\/li>\n<li>Almost incredibly, Shirky does not say much about the immense                 cognitive energy <i>already<\/i> spent on collaborative noncommercial                 cognitive projects. Think Linux and all open-source software,                 tens of thousands of free ebooks scanned and formatted from out-of-copyright                 sources (and a few in-copyright sources, like some of mine, sigh)                 not to mention the work of all those Pixel-Stained Technopeasants                 who had their day (April 23) last week. This is not new news,                 though it&apos;s good for it to be pointed out now and then.<\/li>\n<li>Nor is much said about the general rise in volunteering in more                 traditional social service pursuits, which by and large are not                 cognitive in nature. As problematic as I consider some of his                 conclusions, much good data on volunteering is cited in Arthur                 Brooks&apos; <i>Who Really Cares? <\/i>Not all time and energy released                 from TV watching now goes into, or would go into, cognitive pursuits.<\/li>\n<li>And the ugly truth that no one seems willing to recognize: A                 <i>huge<\/i> percentage of people simply don&apos;t have the ability                 to contribute meaningfully to cognitive projects. This may be                 by genetics or by adverse circumstances, but it&apos;s true nonetheless.                 I keep thinking that a lot of them, if there were no TV, would                 go back to gin or to worse things that didn&apos;t exist when gin was                 invented in 1740.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My early conclusion: There&apos;s less cognitive surplus than the article               suggests, and less upside to be gained by turning away from TV.               People inclined to be creative already cluster toward the bottom               of the TV time curve, and a lot of the people I consider brilliant               don&apos;t watch TV at all. There is almost certainly an irreducable               minimum number of people who need TV as an anaesthetic, and this               number may be higher than we care to admit. Loneliness, clinical               depression, and other psychiatric problems dissipate and render               useless an immense amount of human energy, and we don&apos;t seem any               closer to solving those problems than we were in 1740. Those problems               may not in fact be solvable, though saying so won&apos;t make me any               friends.<\/p>\n<p>Still, anything that nudges people away from the box toward creative               or collaborative pursuits of any nature is a good thing. My problem               at this point in my life is not TV but sleep, since I need ten hours               in bed to yield eight hours of useful sleep cycles. The time I used               to spend commuting I now spend wondering why I&apos;m not asleep, and               if I could lick that problem I would get a great deal more done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>sent me a pointer to an article by Clay Shirky about the &#8220;cognitive surplus&#8221;\u2014excess brainpower not needed for making a living. Thought-provoking in the extreme; read it if you haven&apos;t already. Shirky&apos;s thesis is that free time created by postwar productivity gains have been sopped up by watching TV, and if we watched only a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[63,46],"class_list":["post-429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideasandanalysis","tag-internet","tag-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":442,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions\/442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}