Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
- By Clay Shirky
- The Penguin Press, 242 pages, $32.50
The Shallows : What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
- By Nicholas Carr
- Norton, 276 pages, $33.50
When the spread of the printing press popularized the reading and writing of books, it spread panic throughout Europe’s ruling classes. For the first time the clergy could no longer control religion, science or medicine. Nor could the monarchs dominate every aspect of political life or grip the reins of a burgeoning capitalistic economy. There were concerns among intellectuals too. Robert Burton, vicar of Oxford University and author of the 17th-century classic, The Anatomy of Melancholy, complained of the “vast chaos and confusion of books” that make the eyes and fingers ache.”Even Edgar Allan Poe called “The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information.”
Fast-forward to today: Our growing immersion in digital life is sparking similarly vigorous debates over the impact of digital technologies on the way we think and behave, as individuals and as a globally interconnected society.
Given that we are living through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, it would indeed be a paradox if it turned out that the Internet was systematically destroying our ability to think.
Two new and noteworthy books – one by Nicholas Carr, the other by Clay Shirky – provide contrasting accounts of the digital age to date and help illuminate the deep divisions among the Web gurus who attempt to explain how the Internet is changing the world. Shirky posits the existence of a vast cognitive surplus drawn from a growing global community of Internet users whose enormous pool of free time and creative capacity can now be tapped in pursuit of virtually any shared goal or endeavour. Carr sees a cognitive deficit of sorts as the Internet robs the online population of their attention spans and their capacity for deep contemplation. Put simply, Shirky says the Internet is making us smarter. Carr claims it’s making us dumber.
Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University and keen observer of all things digital, starts with the observation that increases in GDP, educational attainment and lifespan since the Second World War have forced the industrialized world to grapple with a novel problem: a massive abundance of free time. Thanks to the advent of the 40-hour workweek, the planet’s educated population has something like a trillion hours a year of free time to spend doing things they care about.
Sounds great, except there’s a problem. Most of our surplus time is absorbed by television. Americans spend some 200 billion hours watching sitcoms every year. Intellectual elites typically bemoan the mass public’s affection for TV sagas such as Survivor and American Idol in the same way that Karl Marx abhorred religion. But Shirky is a glass-half-full kind of guy, arguing that our television addiction is actually an enormous cognitive surplus in waiting: a vast reservoir of time and talent that could be redirected to serving the common good if only we could be convinced to swap our sitcoms for time spent contributing to projects like Wikipedia.
Shirky is not so naive to suggest that we will all soon awaken from our TV-induced slumber and start cranking out Wikipedia entries en masse. But according to Shirky, only a small proportion of the public would need to become more civically engaged to make a big difference. A back of the envelope calculation suggests Wikipedia was built with roughly 1 per cent of the man-hours Americans spend watching TV every year (the rough equivalent of 100 million hours of thought). If even a fraction of our surplus time could be directed to the creation of other digital public goods, the connected population could be producing hundreds of Wikipedia-like projects every year. Today we may have The World's Funniest Home Videos running 24/7 on YouTube, but the potentially world-changing uses of cognitive surplus are slowly emerging, he says.
