Mining the Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky has been giving talks on his book Here Comes Everybody — his "masterpiece," per Cory Doctorow — and BoingBoing picks up one of them, from the Web 2.0 conference. Shirky has come up with a quantification of the attention that TV has been absorbing for more than half a century. Shirky defines as a unit of attention "the Wikipedia": 100 million person-hours of thought. As a society we have been burning 2,000 Wikipedias per year watching mostly sitcoms. We're stopping now. Here's a video of another information-dense Shirky talk, this one at Harvard.

Fascinating

I was going to make a comment about such statistics being next to meaningless. ("What if nobody watched TV" is similar to "what if we didn't have any wars" or "what if all religions suddenly settled their differences"). Then I RTFA. And I'm not entirely convinced but I really hope he's right.

He making a compelling case for the end of the TV era. Can you feel it coming? Just think what it might mean...

Re:Fascinating

I don't know anyone that still watches TV like people used to in the 90s. I haven't rtfa'd yet, but if he's saying that those hours will be put to good use now that we're not watching sitcoms I'm not so hopeful; it's not like you can't waste time on the net, that's all a lot of people (most?) use it for.

Re:Fascinating

He's probably right, the TV era is going away and getting replaced with the MMORPG era.

Not that it makes any difference whether we waste our time on soap operas or getting epix though.

Re:Fascinating

The irony is that TV makers brought it onto themselves by constantly lowering standards.

I don't think that's true. Compare a season of "Heroes" to a season of "A-Team" or "Night Rider". Look at the quality progression of "Star Trek" "Star Trek:the Next Generation" "Battlestar Galactica". I think television quality has migrated towards the extremes, there is some television that is very good, and some that makes Charlie the Unicorn [youtube.com] look brilliant. I'm hoping that the rise of YouTube is going to be the end of reality TV.

Re:Fascinating

He's right and his proof was made before he wrote the article, evidenced by the existence of Wikipedia itself. For this one project alone, 1/10,000 of the cognitive surplus of one year has already been harvested.

Right, because all of the mental effort that went into creating Wikipedia was taken from the mental effort that was wasted by watching TV, and not from anything else.

Seriously, do you even know what the word "proof" means? Your statement isn't based on any kind of fact so it may not even be true itself, much less prove anything else.

The article is based on two whopping unfounded assumptions:

- That this cognitive surplus even exists. It's possible that people simply have a finite amount of thought available per unit time and that this thought is already being completely expended. The fact that people in the past had much less free time is meaningless; they also had much less requirement for thought in their work and in their lives. Maybe a consequence of the move from mindless drones to modern thought-workers is that there isn't much thought left to be used in the free time created.

- That mental effort is interchangeable. This should be obviously false, not just unproven. It should be clear to anyone who has interacted with humans that when any kind of goal is at stake, some people's brains are vastly more effective at reaching it than others. If your goal is some physics problem, an hour of Albert Einstein's brain is probably worth more than the entire lifetime of that girl who made me a sandwich at the deli today. You can't say that there are X person-hours being wasted in front of the TV which could do awesome things if they were put to use elsewhere. These are not CPU cycles, you can't just load new software and go.

Now, overall I think that the guy's talk has a good point and tells a lot of truth. But it goes too far when talking about mental effort as if it were fungible, and there's no way that any of his conclusions are proven at all, much less by the mere existence of Wikipedia.

Nope.

I don't think that stopping the practice of watching long hours of re-ran Seinfeld episodes, so that you can spend even more hours writing and following links to various discussions and trivia about Seinfeld episodes and looking for places to download bootlegs of the same is an indication that, finally, all of that brainpower is getting put back to productive use.

Re:

Sound point, but his argument is a little more subtle. Not all that brainpower will be put to constructive use, at least not in the next generation or two. But his order-of-magnitude calculations illustrate that rerouting just a tiny fraction of that brain

Re:

Entertainment isn't directly supposed to be productive

I'm certainly not going to debate that, and that's not my contention, here. I'm talking about the assertion that time spent online is somehow, by its nature, more productive than the time spent catch

Re:

Those kids who spend all their time IMing and MySpacing, and can't focus anything for more than 30 seconds will be perfectly suited to working in an office [news.com]. According to the article I linked to, most office workers get interrupted every 3 minutes. So the

Double-standards?

If, in defending the free exchange of media, we note that each "pirated" copy does not necessarily equal a lost sale, why should we think watching sitcoms necessarily equals lost useful effort?

Re:Double-standards?

The cognitive surplus may be low-grade ore, but a gold mine is economical even if there's only one ounce of gold per ton.

Re:Double-standards?

While I'd agree with you that there needs to be some downtime to help refresh one's brainpower, I think the question of "how much downtime" is the key.

I used to watch 2 hours of TV a night (which I believe is below the American average), and felt that after a hard day of work, it was nice to relax and just absorb for a while. But after recently giving up caffeine, I decided to see how many of my other "normal" activities were based on addiction too. So I gave up an hour of TV and tried to put it towards other uses (in this case, re-doing my office).

The first week was fine, the second week was hell, but by the end of the first month, I was actually adapted to not watching more than an hour every day. I had moved past working on my office, and was writing books again, debugging old code I hadn't touched in months. I had been ignoring productivity to indulge in something I could SWORN was essential to my mental stability.

I'm actually torn about this situation, because I make my living producing entertainment products that I hope people will mindlessly consume... but if we actually DO move beyond the old-fashioned paradigm, the hours I produce may have a harder time fitting into the "free time" the rest of the world has.

Someone should put some of their newly-acquired brainspace into finding a way to make TV more socially-and-interactively useful, so I don't have to worry so much.

Re:Double-standards?

"I'm actually torn about this situation, because I make my living producing entertainment products that I hope people will mindlessly consume"

Why be torn? There will NEVER be a shortage of people ready to gobble mindless entertainment. What you do as a self-aware person doesn't mean fuck all to the drones, so make stuff that makes money for you and then enjoy the
power money gives you. You cannot (no one can) ensmarten the drones. Leave them to their American Idol and other comforting bullshit. They don't care what you want.

"Someone should put some of their newly-acquired brainspace into finding a way to make TV more socially-and-interactively useful, so I don't have to worry so much."

They did. It's called a computer.

Wow

Just wow.

My hippy-social-justice-queer-tree-hugging-dirt-worshipper self just did a little dance.

Maybe, maybe not

I've been without broadcast TV for 15 years or so, and I find plenty of other trivia to waste my time on. Lacking the daily homogenizing input, I am kind of awkward in conversation with strangers or casual acquaintances. I don't know any of the little catch phrases from the sitcoms, or what any of the sports teams are doing. It would do my social life a lot of good if I watched TV, but I just can't hack it.

I also think that it's a good thing a lot of these folks have the TV to watch. It gives them something to talk about, and keeps them inside, out of trouble. I don't think the infinite number of monkeys technique really applies to advancing human thought. If they're captivated by sitcoms, it's doubtful they are going to have much to contribute.

Re:Maybe, maybe not

You get out there and inspire the Muggles, and see where it gets you. Trying to push the back end of the bell curve into the front is very rarely a rewarding endeavor. As far as I'm concerned, the only way to deal with them is to be polite and get away as soon as possible...which is how I expect them to treat me too, given my ignorance of things that interest them.

I have an endless store of engineering trivia, others have an endless supply of pop culture trivia. It's not good, bad, or otherwise.

Interesting Analysis

This is an interesting analysis of the distribution of users who contribute online:
http://www.tiara.org/blog/?p=272 [tiara.org]

I think the take-home message is that most people don't want to contribute much. The reason is obvious to me - after 40+ hours of working in a week, most people I know want to relax and not think much; passively watching TV is the perfect outlet.

Re:

Wait until they discover that, as the proverb says, "a change of work is the best rest".

Just kinda stopped watching..

I noticed a few months ago, I don't watch TV anymore. I'll buy DVDs and sit down and watch them, but there is too much interesting stuff going on now, and too many other things to do to sit there on the couch. Most of the programs are utterly asinine, and the good nuggets are all available through other media (DVD) now.

The most interesting thing is this is something that just sort of happened.. not something I set out to do. I think my cat might spend more time in front of the TV than I do.

Amusing ourselves to death

Two things about Clay Shirky's critique of TV:

1. He's right.
2. He is pissing in the wind.

The Internet, and in particular Web 2.0 and the interactive/collaborative opportunities it creates, have pretty much already been coopted into the trivialization of thought and discourse. For every Wikipedia article there are hundreds of lame blog posts on boneheaded topics (including, for some of you, this one!). From an epistomological perspective, the Internet/television convergence is only accelerated by Web 2.0 technology, because the medium conditions us to behave trivially, a sizable fraction of people like it that way, and the economics of the medium tend to reinforce and extend that use.

The interested reader may also want to check out Neil Postmans's magnum opus [amazon.com] on the death blow television has administered to our public discourse, written some twenty years ago.

Post Inducer

Doesn't that essay make you want to post comments to Slashdot, rather than just read? It does me.

Re:Post Inducer

I was thinking of posting anonymously because everyone agreeing with TFA is getting systematically modded down. But I'm going to stick my neck out on this one.

I think many people on this forum hope that they are the only ones who know how to type or make any sort of meaningful contribution on line. This is painful arrogance. I see a lot of: (1) "the statistics are meaningless" and (2) "most people are stupid and can contribute nothing" comments here. It gets redundant watching people who measure their IQ as a function inverse of their slashdot id.

The thing that escape those with this arrogance, though, is that everyone is able to contribute online. Every thought that comes out of people is a contribution to the collective consciousness, even if you make redundant groupthink posts on slashdot. Although a handful of websites (e.g. slashdot) pioneered online collaborative thought, they will not forever remain the only legitimate sources of such. For example, how many people have solved a programming or computer administration problem from a poorly written post by someone who "knew less" than themselves? I suspect many, although it may be tough for these individuals to admit.

good missed points

Jerry Mander's book [wikipedia.org] from the 70s made a crucial distinction between active and passive media. The above slashdot comments seem limited to wikipedia bashing or a splitting of web 2.0 hairs re:2008. That is, the percentage that are coherent, which is low by the usually high standards of non technical commentary on this site ... cough ...

This reminded me of seeing Esther Dyson and some pundits on Charley Rose a couple of years ago. They all laughed when Dyson said: "I can't tell you what web 2.0 means". Web 2.04 (or wherever we're at) means everyone can be Esther Dyson, everyone can be Charley Rose. Not everyone can be Tom Friedman as it takes years to acquire the ego involved in that much stupidity. Now is everyone going to be Charley Rose? No. Will there still be old school one way media? Yes, at least for a long time.

Mander's point is that TV is passive and active participation works the brain muscles more than then passive staring at the screen. The brain is a muscle, use it or lose it. As someone who quit TV, not unlike drugs, in my teen years I've long argued that TV was the reason for the collapse of literacy in the US. Will the wide open web cure that? Probably not, we shall see, but any change is good. American pop culture, mainstream corporate entertainment, now resembles a piece of chewing gum so worked over there is no flavor left (see: pop music). Are endless sectarian/technical blog exchanges entertaining? YMMV, but compared to what's on TV and the radio they at least measure up.

Tried it already

I'm about to graduate from college and at the end of this semester, I realized I had a ton of math homework that I needed to do in order to pass. Why was this the case? I'm a smart guy so it's really not very difficult for me, and it's not just busywork.

I had been wasting time playing video games. I decided about 3 weeks ago that I wasn't going to spend my time doing things that have no outcome and only serve as time sinks: no video games, no pot smoking, no TV watching(unless it's informative). Exceptions (like social events) do exist, but I've stuck to it.

Since then, I put time into my senior seminar and it ended up kicking ass, done a whole semester's worth of math in about 4 straight days, greatly increased my guitar playing ability, learned to meditate, and learned a new programming language. I've also taken care of loads of smaller things I may have just ignored and come closer to some friends and family. Most of this great success is due to the fact that I've eliminated my biggest time sink (video games). I imagine I'll also have more money, since video games are expensive and I'm selling my X360.

These changes have allowed me to come closer to my full potential, and I don't regret it one bit. For me, video games took hours (years?) of time that I'll never get back, but at least I'm young enough that it's not too late. I feel like I just woke up from a coma.

I strongly encourage everyone to examine his time-sinking habits and eliminate them; it may change your life!

Re:Tried it already

The key isn't to get rid of it entirely, that is just going from one extreme to another. If you have to worry about being productive all the time you are just going to fizzle out more often then not. The key of course is moderation. Sometimes I find slacking off helps when I am at a standstill on a difficult problem. Just getting my mind off of it seems to allow it to wander and usually I will wind up figuring out the critical step while my nose isn't buried in a book.

You can also find more productive ways of slacking off, if that makes any sense. For instance, my guilty vice is South Park, so I loaded up the latest episode today and watched it while I was on an elliptical machine in the gym(with a set of wireless headphones). I was able to watch the episode and workout at the same time.