Rialtas.net – Government 2.0

I came across this excellent short talk by Clay Shirky author of  “Here comes everybody“, speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo (22-25 April 2008) about what he terms  ‘the cognitive surplus’ that television (in his opinion mostly sit-coms) has been masking for the past 60 years.

Here is an excerpt:

“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.”"

Shirky explains that he and Martin Wattenberg at IBM have calculated That

• Currently all of Wikipedia represents the accumulation of around one hundred million hours of human thought.

• That television watching represents around 200 billion hours of human attention in the US alone, every year. (or 2000 Wikipedia projects a year)

• That 100 million hours are spent every weekend in the US just watching ads.

This is a big surplus.

He asks, Where do Wikipedia contributors find the time? and identifies that Wikipedia a tiny project within an overall ‘architecture of participation’

Shirky argues how the interesting thing about a surplus like this is that you don’t know what to do with it at first. Hence the gin and sitcoms.

Shirky reckons we are still in the ‘all special cases’ phase, where outputs cannot reliably be predicted because there is so much complexity. Instead we are trying lots and lots of things to see what works and hoping that whoever fails, ‘fails informatively’ in order that the path slowly becomes a little clearer. He gives the example of a professor in Brazil (Vasco Furtado) who created a Wiki map for crime in Brazil -where users can put push pins in Google maps and add information to characterise the crime, and over time a map starts to emerge. This map represents tacit information, society knows this without really knowing it in the sense of ‘don’t go there that, street corner is dangerous’ but there is no source where you can take advantage of this information, no point to go to to find it out.

“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.”

Shirky explains that the internet connected global population watches about 1 trillion hours of TV every year (about 5 times the size of USA annual consumption) and that if people watched 99% as much TV as they used to, that the cognitive surplus (1%) would represent about 10,000 Wikipedia scale projects a year worth of participation

By extension I suppose it can be argued that in the past the intelligentsia/intellectuals within a society were individuals that enjoyed for various reasons the availability of some cognitive surplus and were able to use this surplus to write their articles essays and treatise in attempts to influence the opinions of the ‘masses’ and the governments or other rulers of the day.

Today many have the potential to enjoy this kind of cognitive surplus and wouldn’t it be amazing if instead of applying it entirely to watching TV ,that  instead individuals began to use some of this surplus cognitive capacity to engage with governments, public organisations and other citizens to collaborate in the design of   better ways to govern and be governed and to help in the design of a better society where everyone can participate in the creation of a better future.