What have you done with your cognitive surplus today?

Recently a colleague of mine and I had a fascinating discussion over drinks one night about a concept that Clay Shirky refers to as “cognitive surplus”. He then sent me a link to a speech Clay gave at the Web 2.0 Conference in April of this year, called “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” (video).

I love reading something that really makes you think, and Shirky nails it. Effectively he describes the cyclical anaesthetization and awakening of Western society, and suggests that we’re in the middle of that cycle currently. I can’t speak to the historical accuracy of his description of the pre-Industrial Revolution gin carts helping everyone in London to dull their senses, but I can totally relate to his modern day example: the sitcom. He refers to Desperate Housewives as “a cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking…” I love that line!

Obviously, Shirky is a fan of wikis, and uses Wikipedia as a unit of measure for productivity of the collective against which he compares non-productive activity, most notably the watching of television. He estimates that there’s 100 million hours of collective human thought in “all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in.” He doesn’t share his calculations, but he seems like a smart guy, so I’ll take that number at its face.

He then cites statistics on the amount of time spent watching TV per year – 200 billion hours in the US alone, or as he equates it to “two thousand Wikipedia projects a year”. Therein lies his “cognitive surplus”. People sitting on their couches as passive recipients of brain candy, rather than being active producers…Doing nothing as opposed to doing something.

Where we diverge is probably in our views on profiting from this cognitive surplus. While he doesn’t come out and say it, my guess is that he believes that society as a whole will benefit from contributions made from this cognitive surplus and the collective sharing of knowledge. That’s a little too warm and fuzzy for me. I’d take a slightly different view. If we were to look at this through an economic lens, then tapping into this cognitive surplus could grow our GDP at Chinese-like rates!

There is not a shortage of time, there’s a shortage of intellectual activity.

That’s my .02 (with much inspiration from Mr. Shirky)!

Martin Suter

(martin.suter@iplicensing.net)

Comments

[hb]

Great article. I totally agree that there are huge economic consequences of the cognitive surplus. Where we’ve ordinarily relied on machines and computing to make us more efficient through process and structure, we tend to forget how the machine sort of pushes back and makes us work better through structure too. I figure the next huge productivity leaps will come from machines that make leveraging human understanding easier, and in turn create a culture of producers.

This will be a hard phenomena to observe, but I suspect the US will do well since we are still the hub of all technology developments in the world. The more interesting derivative indicator will be how developing players with varying commitments to bridging digital divides fare. I actually think there is a good chance South Korea and Japan will be on the leading edge of this new development; the impact of that is going to be far reaching, everything from economics to language could be affected.