Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Clay Shirky. New York, NY: Penguin, 2010. 242 pages.
It sometimes seems that the hardest thing to do in the Information Age is to communicate.
In the rush of easily accessible data and the maelstrom of conflicting viewpoints, two otherwise intelligent people can talk past one another as they stake out territory with the tenacity of computer viruses. NYU professor Clay Shirky and media critic Nicholas Carr have been squaring off now for two years over what impact the Internet is having on our society. Shirky takes the more optimistic viewpoint, Carr the more pessimistic.
Carr threw down the gauntlet with his 2008 Atlantic cover article “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” and has continued the debate with his recent book The Shallows. Shirky provides a response in Cognitive Surplus, but criticizes skeptics like Carr only obliquely. Shirky says their main frustration is with the profusion of choice: “Scarcity,” he says, “is easier to deal with than abundance.”
But this book doesn’t dwell much on the naysayers. Instead, it frames the subject of the Internet with a bold and startling vision about its potential. “Imagine,” he says, “treating the free time of the world’s educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus.” We’ve not always used that surplus wisely.
Shirky’s case in point is television, and how it has come to dominate our culture. Over much of the planet, Shirky writes, “the three most common activities are . . . work, sleep, and watching TV.” Like gin in early-eighteenth-century Lon-don, twentieth-century television is one of those social habits that critics have denounced and tried hard to minimize, but without success. There are signs now, however, that TV viewing—still thoroughly popular—isn’t quite the juggernaut it used to be. Young people are increasingly turning to the Internet; and the Web, it turns out, allows humans to do things they can’t do with other media—namely, create, produce, and connect.
Instead of devoting twenty passive hours a week to the tube (the international average), people now use a medium that lets them make and share things. That may seem trivial, considering the amount of silly, offensive, or deceptive fare on the Web, but think of it this way: Which do you think contains more enduring cultural, intellectual, and societal value—posting comments on a blog or watching Gilligan’s Island? The Internet is no utopia, but neither are older media.
In fact, some of them may be a good deal less salutary. Take, for example, the online fantasy game World of Warcraft. As Shirky puts it in a tart retort: “However pathetic you may think 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.”
There’s a wide variety of content on the Internet, of course—the widest in any medium—and the largest number of producers of content: a colossal and revolutionary force. The “hundred million hours of cumulative thought” it took to produce Wikipedia is one example of Shirky’s “cognitive surplus,” and while it still pales before the “two hundred billion hours of TV every year,” you can readily see the potential. The Internet can help us—is helping us now—return to a culture of doing rather than simply spectating or consuming. If that sometimes results in sentimentality and self-absorption, scams and hoaxes, fear-peddling and hate-mongering, well, so, too, have the printing press, talk radio, and cable television. All mass media produce dross as well as gold. The difference with the Internet is that ordinary people can engage on their own and with others—relatively independent of government, commerce, and professional authorities—an imperfect but still liberating and democratizing change.
The most powerful aspect of Shirky’s book lies in examples of this social-media engagement. Some of these have what the author refers to as public value—drivers finding one another on the carpooling site PickupPal.com, or sufferers of Lou Gehrig’s disease sharing treatment tips on PatientsLikeMe.com. Others—such as Ushahidi, a Kenyan site that tracks ethnic killing and encourages citizens to help monitor—embody civic ambitions. Or consider what Nisha Susan did in Mangalore, India, after women drinking in a bar there were physically assaulted by religious fundamentalists and then threatened with more reprisals. She created a Facebook page called the “Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women” that instantly drew thousands of members around the world and today claims more than 30,000. They fought back, denouncing the right-wing group and launching a campaign to send pink underwear to its leader, who made more threats and was eventually arrested.
Many people will share and connect even without being paid to do so. This, Shirky says, is what many professionals don’t understand about amateur producers. It’s not always about love of money. Feeling competent or in control, connected, or generous is powerful motivation.
The Web’s culture of participation is a benefit totally absent in Carr’s treatment. Rather, he complains that the “predominant sound in the modern library is the tapping of keys, not the turning of pages,” a petulant gripe when you think about what Susan’s or Ushahidi’s typing means for the welfare others.
In contrast to most media writers wringing their hands at the unprecedented changes underway, Shirky seems positively tranquil and philosophical. “Getting news from a piece of paper, having to be physically near a television at a certain time to see a certain show, keeping our vacation pictures to ourselves as if they were some big secret”—all are historical accidents of time and space, he points out. And while journalism also is being challenged by the Web, it is being supported by it, too. As social-media scholar Carrie Brown-Smith says, “Social media is revolutionizing journalism by allowing us to fulfill our core values—accuracy, engaging the public on matters of civic importance, watchdogging institutions.”
That’s the glittering dimension explored in Cognitive Surplus. Shirky is the new, and more hopeful, Marshall McLuhan.
JOSEPH R. HAYDEN
University of Memphis