I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to manage my time and all the information that comes at me every day. I know a lot of you do too. Many of us run our own companies, are working on cool projects that absorb all of our attention, and are constantly trying to find balance.
In that light, then, the premise of Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
More on all of that in a bit, but first, here are some thoughts I did get from the book that weren’t necessarily related to the implied premise, but that I found way more interesting.
The rise of “citizen journalism”
Shirky points to many examples where the ability of regular citizens to become reporters of the world around them has led to amazing things. And it’s true. Iranians can tweet about the elections to let the world know what’s happening there. The Sudanese can text incident information to help organizations map out needs. These uses of technology are awesome, but I don’t know that they’re the result of a cognitive surplus. They didn’t come about because the Iranians and the Sudanese were watching too much television and found new uses of their time by way of technology. They came about because people had a new mechanism to capture and broadcast what was happening in their lives. Anne Frank didn’t have Twitter, so she used pen and paper.
The surplus here isn’t the time we spend watching TV. It’s increased access to technology. Shirky notes that “the chance that anyone with a camera will come across an event of global significance is simply the number of witnesses of the event times the percentage of them that have cameras.”
So much content: what to consume?
This idea of citizen journalism isn’t universally embraced. I was at an event a few weeks ago and listened in on a conversation about how blog content isn’t vetted and can’t really be relied upon in the same way that traditional journalism can. Shirky does address this, quoting what the novelist Harvey Swados said in 1951 of the advent of paperbacks:
“Whether this revolution in the reading habits of the American public means that we are being inundated by a flood of trash which will debase farther the popular taste, or that we shall now have available cheap editions of an ever-increasing list of classics, is a question of basic importance to our social and cultural development.”
Shirky notes we didn’t have to choose. We could have both. As it stands today with what’s available to us on the internet, be it vetted material from professionals, or ad-hoc creations from amateurs. In either case (and it’s really more of abroad spectrum than either/or), the same as with books or TV or any other type of information, it’s up to us to be careful consumers. Clay Johnson says we need to consciously consume. He asserts that our abundance isn’t with time, but with information. I know that’s certainly my situation. Time is the most precious possession I have, and I never seem to have enough of it. But information? I’ve got that in spades. It threatens to bury me alive.
In Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
“I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. And how am I going to sort those you, you know? …I think a lot of people feel — not overhwelmed by the amount of stuff they have to do. But overwhelmed by the number of choices they have, and by the number of discrete, different things that come at them… the number of small insistent tugs on them, from a number of different systems and directions.”
As we are provided with more ways to create, we have more to sort through to consume.
Fail a lot in order to succeed
I first started thinking about the idea of valuing failure when reading the The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
Shirky is advocating this idea as well. The act of creation is what’s important, even if it’s bad Charmed fan fiction. And while I certainly think anyone who wants to write poetry should go for it, I also find the notion of failing a lot in order to succeed to be interesting. We tend to fear failure. Shirky describes how failure helps us succeed using a book metaphor: “If there was an easy formula for writing something that would become prized for decades or centuries, we wouldn’t need experimentation, but there isn’t, so we do.”
User-generated content: are we giving something up for free or getting something for free?
Shirky writes about services like YouTube and Flickr, “it can seem unfair for amateurs to be contributing their work for free to people who are making money from aggregating and sharing that work.” He notes Nicholas Carr’s use of the term “digital sharecropping” to describe how content creators are being potentially ripped off. But are they? Shirky concludes that (amateur) content creators don’t mind because they are creating for love and not for money.
I dunno. I think that at least in some cases content creators don’t mind because they don’t look at it as “digital sharecropping” — giving away their labor to others who profit. They look at it as a fair exchange of services. The content creators get a place to host their work, the tools to share it with others, and wide visibility — for free! This is something was difficult, if not impossible, before the web, and something that we tended to pay fairly hefty prices for in the early days of the web. And this (mostly free) opportunity is what makes much of what Shirky celebrates in his book possible.
Why we share
Shirky references a 2006 NYU paper called “Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue” that describes what motivates us to voluntarily contribute to groups. In addition to personal motivations such as autonomy and competence, the paper describes social motivations around connectedness and sharing/generosity. Yahoo’s recently released reputation model addresses the personal motivations, but not the social ones. And the social ones can certainly be motivating. Shirky calls this, in part, “go[ing] public to find people who think like you.” He says to ask of users:
- Are their desires for autonomy or competence being rewarded?
- Are their desires to feel connected or generous being rewarded?
He asks these questions to answer the question of why people would share, create, and build communities, but I think they are also create questions to ask when building a new community and attempting to encourage user participation.
We don’t want things for the sake of those things; we want what those things provide
I think this is an important idea for anyone making any content available, building any product, appealing to any audience. Shirky brings this up to explain why older people would adopt email. It’s not that they wanted to try out the latest technology. They wanted what all of us want: to communicate with others. He writes “no one wants e-mail for itself, any more than anyone wants electricity for itself; rather, we want the things that electricity enables.”
But this notion goes well beyond his point. No one cares about your features or that you’ve worked really hard on your product or about all the data you’ve just made available as an XML file. They care about solving their problems, doing things that make them happy, making their lives better. Focus on how you can help your audience do those things and you’ve got their attention. (I talked about this during my 60 seconds as part of the Influencer Project.)
The value of combinability
Shirky writes “if you have a stick, and someone gives you another one, you have two sticks. If you have a piece of knowledge — that rubbing two sticks together in a certain way can make fire — you can do something of value you couldn’t do before.” And here too is another new surplus the culture of the web gives us. By sharing knowledge, tools, failures, successes, ideas, we can better combine them for sums much greater than the parts. He notes that the community size has to be big enough, sharing has to be easy, there should be a common format or way of understanding the information, and then, there’s the last component, the one that technology can’t solve — people. Can we work well together? Do we understand each other, trust each other, want others to make what we do better?
Build rules as you need them
Don’t spend time creating a solution to a problem until you have a problem. I think this holds true of online communities, ways of iterating online products, and even building startups. When I started my company a couple of years ago, I didn’t set up any processes at all. I’m building them out now as I find I need them, based on experience of what’s been working and not. If I had set everything up in advance, I’d still be spending just as much time now adjusting it.
What about TV?
I think that if Shirky had relied less on the idea of using TV time for more productive things, the book would have been stronger. I clearly found much of what he wrote about interesting, but I got distracted every time he’d bring the point back to how dang much we watch television.
Shirky and I really aren’t so far apart on how we think about human behavior. He writes that “human motivations change little over the years, but the opportunity can change a little or a lot, depending on the social environment.” But then we diverge: “the raw material of this change is the free time available to us.” In truth, the stats point at televison viewing at an all time high over the same period that Shirky notes the explosion of creation and sharing online. We aren’t watching less TV in order to upload cute videos of our cat to YouTube. We’re doing both.
Do we really watch that much TV a day?
This was the first point that distracted me. I started wondering what those stats really mean. Most people I know who do watch TV tend to do it while they are getting ready for work in the morning, and eating breakfast, and writing their college essays. How much of that time is really spent solely in front of the TV? Because you can’t really make a lolcat in leiu of watching TV while you’re ironing your clothes.
David Foster Wallace talked about our excessive TV watching way back in 1990 in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction“. In that essay, he describes a 1985 book called Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life
The book’s portrait of how we would do that are different than what’s come to be, but the general idea isn’t so far off.
Is community engagement and creation really better than and a reasonable alternative to TV?
Shirky asserts that creation — any creation — is better than mere consumption. But is that true? Is creating a lolcat and sharing it really better than relaxing to an episode of 30 Rock? And what about the percentage of those hours we spend watching the news (or possibly The Daily Show) to learn about the world? I know that in my case, I watch TV when my brain is unable to do anything else. I’ve been working for 16 hours, I can’t even process words in books very well, and I need to distract my brain so that I can get some sleep. In those instances, I find TV useful in ways that editing Wikipedia couldn’t be.
Shirky notes, “the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.” Implying that a creative act always trumps acts of other kinds, I suppose. Explaining why it’s better to play World of Warcraft (acknowledging that some may think of this as “grown men and women sitting in their basements pretending to be elves”) than watch TV, he says “at least they’re doing something… however pathetic it is to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience: it’s worse to sit in your basement trying to decide whether Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.”
Maybe for Shirky it is. Not that I’m a TV apologist, but one could say the same of reading: it’s a solitary activity (generally more so than TV), you aren’t creating anything or doing anything as you read. Or as you sit on a bench and watch the water. As I wrote at the beginning, it’s the insistence in the book to always bring everything back to the time we waste on TV that I find fault with. I’m not at all saying that creating and sharing and being social are bad things.
And certainly too much TV is probably not great. Going back to Wallace again, who rather famously had a love/hate relationship with TV, likened television to candy.
“What if you ate it all the time? Real pleasurable, but it dudn’t have any calories in it. There’s something really vital about food that candy’s missing… There’s nothing sinister, the thing that’s sinister about it is the pleasure that it gives you to make up for what it’s missing is a kind of… addictive, self-consuming pleasure.”
And at least in part, he agreed with what Shirky would later focus on in this book, as well perhaps agree with me:
“It gives you a certain kind of pleasure that I would argue is fairly passive. There’s not a whole lot of thought involved, the thought is often fantasy like, ‘I am this guy, I’m having this adventure.” And it’s a way to take a vacation from myself for a while. And that’s fine — I think sort of the same way candy is fine.”
And perhaps Wallace also would agree with Clay Johnson’s assertion that our problems with information overload are around what and how we choose to consume. Wallace noted that his book Infinite Jest
“Why am I getting 75 percent of my calories from candy? I mean that’s something that a little tiny child would do, and that would be all right. But we’re postpubescent, right? Somewhere along the line, we’re supposed to have grown up.”
Shirky also maintains that we are shifting from strictly consumption around TV to “opportunities to comment on the material, share it with friends… and discuss it with other viewers”. I’d argue that we’ve always done that, we simply didn’t do it so publicly and we did it with our friends and coworkers rather than strangers around the world. Sure, it’s easier to share fanfiction now than it was on the 70s when we had to mimeograph ’zines and send them through the mail, but is Shirky really saying fanfiction is how we should spend our supposed “cognitive surplus”? (Particularly since writing fanfiction about TV shows (and commenting on them, labeling them, and so forth), at least, has a prerequisite of watching the shows in question on TV.)
Those who want to create and share and be communal are and always have been. Those who want to watch TV will. And many of us will do both.
Early in the book, Shirky writes, “this book is about the novel resource that has appeared as the world’s cumulative free time is addressed in aggregate.” But once you forget about the free time and TV aspects of the book and focus on the rest, it seems that what’s he’s really saying is that our human tendencies to create and share that we’ve always felt regardless of the free time we have available can now be done globally and at scale, and there’s real value to be harnessed from that.
July 29th, 2010 at 12:40 am
Interesting read.
..I would have to say watching Modern Marvels would be better than creating a lolcat or playing world of warcraft in your basement.
and
Mary Ann is cuter. With no personal experience on trying to figure that out, i would say trying would still be better than playing world of warcraft pretending to be an elf.
…
on a more serious note – trying to promote a small town to grow the community with no budget, its going to be very valuable to be able to create and share what we have to offer to such a large scale! which is awesome!