Cognitive Surplus

This has been getting muchas love from the blogs, for good reason:
At a Web 2.0 conference last week, Clay Shirky discussed how sitcoms are like gin, and how four-year-olds understand the world, and how people find the time to LOLcat or WoW.

Here’s the transcript.
Shirky’s bit about participatory culture is worth getting your head around. I think I have a post on this coming, but for now you can get your fix of awesome ideas straight from Shirky.

6 thoughts on “Cognitive Surplus”

  3. Pretty huge irony in him making an aside about the TV producer not *wanting* to believe what he was saying, when he’s clearly addressing an audience for whom his message is basically a giant pat on the back…
    Ridiculously entertaining, but I made the mistake of watching it twice. Got up this morning and have to admit I’ve hit the point of thinking he’s something like a courtier amusing the patrons.
    Curious about the central assumption that the time spent “doing something” is time in which people were “doing nothing”, i.e. watching TV. I guess there must be stats for levels of participation in clubs, sports, social meetings, volunteering, etc… over the past 50 years.

  4. A thought – a bit apropos of nothing – what about the hours spent doing something in front of TV? Mostly when I’m watching TV I’m doing something else as well e.g. cooking, household chores, repotting plants, playing with the cat, writing to penpals etc etc etc, but when I’m on the computer, because it’s interactive I’m just doing the computer.
    I agree participatory media have their advanatages over consumer media, I’m just not convinced by his argument that time spent participating is not time wasted, just as much as time spent watching TV while cooking dinner, if not more so in the case of participating in things like WoW.
    However, to fully judge his arguments I’d need to examine probably about 100 years of time use surveys to evaluate the total time spent by people interacting with media, versus time spent not interacting with media, or multiple time uses, which really would be time wasted 🙂

  5. Yeah, Shirky’s point gets a lot murkier on reflection. I think his fundamental claim is sound – that the advance in technology that has allowed participation in cultural production on a massive scale is a net good, and that this is now a baseline expectation for media. The whole gin-sitcom stuff he wraps it up in is much shakier, but I kind of don’t want to push it too hard, because while it overstates things it hits some important buttons – that (oldmedia) TV is a massive non-productive timesink for many, many people. People have been overlaying TV on to work forever (knitting or ironing or whatever in front of the box), and people have even been making TV interactive in all ways available since TV didn’t have pictures and was called ‘radio’ (call-in shows, kids playing The Shadow in the playground, etc).
    I can’t remember the source, so take this with standard internet-claim salt intake, but I’m under the impression that internet and particpatory culture has been cannibalising TV watching among the youth market. Just watch the advertising dollars flying towards the internet for a sign of that.

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