May 8th, 2008
Are we all just cognitive surplus?
Clay Shirky, and his truly handsome hairline, is not into the ragehol like I am. That is, he does not anger easily.
But he admits to nearly losing it recently, when after describing a Wikipedia skirmish to a TV producer, he got the question
“Where do they find the time?”
I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
The cognitive surplus, all that time we waste in front of the idiot box, he estimates at 200 billion hours a year, in the U.S. alone.
Shirky compares TV to gin, which masked the wrenching societal changes of the 18th century industrial revolution in an alcoholic fog.
That’s where the time building Wikipedia comes from, he argues, the world waking up from its TV-induced hangover and coming to personal terms with our post-industrial age. Open source is just one stream in this Kahani of time.
Interesting thesis. Just how big is this cognitive surplus, and what are we doing with it?
I’ve been experimenting with this thesis for a generation now. Both my kids have networked PCs, they’ve had them since they were little. She’s now 20, he’s 16.
How big is the cognitive surplus here on Winter Avenue?
It’s big, but perhaps not as big as Shirky makes out. My own time online is work time, therefore not part of the surplus.
More to the point, what are we doing with the surplus?
My son, a dedicated student with his mother’s first-class mind, spends his extra time playing networked video games, mostly shoot-em-ups and strategy games.
My daughter, a lovely young woman now seeking her path, divides her surplus between TV and fairly mindless sites like Neopets and Fanfiction.
Both are engaging their minds to a far greater degree than I did at their age, when my own surplus time was spent on the Rockford Files and the New York Mets. (I now waste it on Netflix and the Wigan Latics.)
But are we all, really, taking the psychic equivalent of, say, Merlot? Are we taking advantage of our cognitive surplus, taking real advantage of it?
Or is the real advantage being taken by my lovely bride, a talented programmer who never watches TV, and who spends all the off-hours she can on her “throne” pillow by the back wall of the house, reading books?
Just asking.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
