Media spotlight: Cognitive Surplus
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By Clay Shirky
Love it or hate it the internet dominates both how we work and our personal lives. Everything from finding a partner, a financial adviser or information on a mortgage to playing computer games with friends can now be done in a virtual world.
The likes of Wikipedia, Facebook, Linkedin and MoneySavingExpert are all examples of people coming together and working for a common goal, whether that’s sticking lame captions on pictures of cats or updating information.
This is the main subject area of Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky - how the internet is being used to change our lives for the better and why we behave in the way that we do.
Shirky argues that we are leading more active lives through the internet now that television has lost its stranglehold over our lives.
The time we previously would have spent passively sitting on a couch watching TV have been freed up so that we can focus all our mental energies on stuff that we actually want to do.
TV as described by Shirky is the enemy of human development - in the 40-odd years in which it was the number one form of entertainment, he likens it to a part-time job. Someone born in the 1960s he says has watched some 50,000 hours worth of TV on average.
To hammer home his point he likens the West’s TV consumption to the gin craze that gripped London in the 1720s. As Britain lurched from a place of cottage industries to mass industrialisation thousands of people flocked from the countryside to the capital but there was no infrastructure to deal with this so life was harsh.
To ease their collective distress Shirky argues that the people effectively anaesthetised themselves with gin.
Legislation failed to curb the problem - the only thing that dealt with it was a restructuring of London society so that it was a less hostile place.
Similarly, when people were slouched in front of the TV they were doping themselves up with images and anodyne entertainment. Yes, that’s right - you may have thought spending night after night watching Eastenders and Coronation Street was just good clean fun, but actually you had a problem.
The salvation for our TV-addicted souls was the web and Shirky spends the rest of the book coming up with countless examples of what can be done once you put down the TV remote and get connected.
One of the best is the example of the website for Korean boyband Dong Bang Shin Ki which in 2008 became the unlikely vehicle by which a nationwide demonstration erupted against Korea’s decision to end its ban of US beef.
Shirky not only explains how the internet has redefined our behaviour but also why in a simple and easy to understand way.
Having a collective voice online can be a powerful weapon and the old media outlets of TV, newspapers and books can no longer dictate the tone with which this collective voice manifests itself. The recent broker petition to the government calling for an end to dual pricing is a prime example of this.
And while Shirky may go over the top at times with his description of the TV epidemic of the past 50 years, as someone who wasted their childhood vegetating in front of a telly, it certainly strikes a chord.
Book review by Robert Thickett
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