[wordup] Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

[Adam Shand]

Wow, this is a great article ... I love that people other then me are  
talking shit about TV! :-)

Adam.

Via: rebecca <rebecca at wetafx.co.nz>
Source: http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
By Clay Shirky on April 26, 2008 10:48 AM

(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at the Web  
2.0
conference, April 23, 2008.)

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in  
the
last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical  
technology,
for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are
amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the  
streets of
London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate  
with
the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and  
museums,
increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of  
things
we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped
seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus,
one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to
get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit  
of
social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole
enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World  
War a
whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising  
educational
attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of
people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society
forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage
something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it  
watching
TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's
Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives.
Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat
sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused
society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that
we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a
crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that
surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in
everybody's basement.

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in
the introduction, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody,  
which
has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I
had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see  
whether
I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out  
there
that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may
remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years
ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The
talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the  
whole
community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in
Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article-- 
fighting
offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto  
is an
odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar  
system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a
conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That
wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and  
said,
"Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And 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."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of  
unit, all
of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk  
page,
every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that
represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human
thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a
back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude,
about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone,
every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000
Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still  
another
way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just  
watching
the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they  
find
the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't  
understand
how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's
finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of  
participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society
doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the  
sitcoms.
Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the
existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it?  
It's
precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people  
have
to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get  
integrated,
and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the  
phase I
think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of  
participation is
much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of
gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of  
things
work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting
sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source
software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs  
yet
because there's so much complexity.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and
lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails  
informatively
so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're
going. That's the phase we're in now.

Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A  
couple of
weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a
professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki  
Map for
crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if  
there's a
mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a
Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a
map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a  
town has
some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don't  
go
in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark." But it's something
society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say  
there's no
public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they
have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In fact, one of  
the
things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, "This  
information
may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier  
for me
to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the
authorities who might have it now."

Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social
software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out.  
But the
ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds,
obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already,
which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a
reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough  
of
the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the
citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even
five years ago.

So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or,
rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was  
another
thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same
conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft
guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking:
"Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get
off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw  
that
one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour  
that I
watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing
Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad  
excuse
for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed  
then. I
was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the  
only
option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is  
to
sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from  
personal
experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if  
Ginger
or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do
something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of  
kittens
made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an  
invitation
to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to  
the
viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can
play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big
change.

This is something that people in the media world don't understand.  
Media in
the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we
produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll  
consume
more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But  
media is
actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to  
consume,
but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the
previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something
interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the
opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that  
offer. It
doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on  
the
couch. It just means we'll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus  
we're
talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge
ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that
people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1  
percent
of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet- 
connected
population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about  
five
times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that   
is 100
Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she
was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was
essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the
flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and
produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually
realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and  
settle
down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that
this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial
revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of.  
It's
the sort of thing that society grows into. But I'm not sure she believed
me, in part because she didn't want to believe me, but also in part  
because
I didn't have the right story yet. And now I do.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one  
of
them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter  
watching a
DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off  
the
couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment.
Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or
whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting  
around in
the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head  
out
from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a  
mouse
ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's  
targeted
at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those
are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because  
four
year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current
environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go
through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's  
Island,
they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and  
when I
say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy  
this
cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this  
room,
the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next  
good
idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for
the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a  
listener
or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive  
or a
fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a  
little
bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good  
thing
happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

Thank you very much.