Author Archives: Charles Fitzgerald

Subtitled “Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age”, this is Shirky’s second book after Here Comes Everybody, which concerned itself with the dynamics of social production. Shirky is probably the leading social media theorist and a professor at NYU.

This books starts very strong with a historical parallel and a factoid. He points to early 18th century England and the pervasive use of gin by the population to anesthetize themselves against the abrupt social change of the industrial revolution. He then asserts television has played the same role over the last 50 years, absorbing the vast preponderance of free time in the developed world. “The sitcom has been our gin, an infinitely expandable response to the crisis of social transformation”.

The factoid arises in response to a TV producer’s reaction to his relating the story of Wikipedia: “Where do people find the time?” The answer of course is social production is an alternative to watching television, but he goes on to estimate that Wikipedia is the result of on the order of 100 million hours of work. This seems staggering until he puts it in context: Americans watch 200 billion hours of television every year and “we spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials.” That suggests there is a lot of cognitive surplus that could be used to do other things and that is the focus of the book. What happens when the passive TV audience begins to participate, create and share collectively?

Naturally, he has a bunch of examples, though Wikipedia and open source remain the most powerful. The middle is a little disappointing, as he tries at length to explain why people are doing this. It boils down to means, motive and opportunity (just like the common criminal) and he illustrates these concepts with both examples and a variety of psychological experiments. There are both personal motivations (autonomy and competence) and public motivations (membership, generosity). He also has examples of how money can taint the dynamics of social actions. He sees a continuum ranging from personal to communal to public to civic in terms of the benefits of social production. ICanHazCheeseburger is used as an example of the low end of the continuum.

Then as we approach the conclusion he provides some observations on ways to successfully harness cognitive surplus:

Starting

Start small – needs to work for small groups first
Ask “Why?” – what is participant’s motivation?
Behavior follows opportunity – users take advantage of opportunities they understand and value
Default to social – social value trumps personal value

Growing

A hundred users are harder than a dozen and harder than a thousand – where culture gets forged
People differ; More people differ more – average user less useful concept as grow, so allow different levels of participation
Intimacy doesn’t scale – you can have any two of large group of users, active group of users and group of users all paying attention to the same thing
Support a supportive culture – make it easy for participants to support desired norms

Adapting

The faster you learn, the sooner you’ll be able to adapt – change the offering, not the user
Successes cause more problems than failure – address problems as they arise as opposed to trying to anticipate and address all of them in advance.
Clarity is violence – governance should follow value
Try anything. Try everything – encourage experimentation.

He ends with a plea for “As Much Chaos As We Can Stand” experimentation in exploiting the cognitive surplus resource. Don’t let established interests have veto power. And don’t split the difference between entrenched interests and the crazy innovators (the former are self-interested, the later don’t actually know how it will pan out).

“The essential source of value right now is coming less from master strategy than from broad experimentation, because no one has a complete grasp, or even a very good one, about what the next great idea will look like. We are all living through the disorientation that comes from including two billion new participants in a media landscape previously operated by a small group of professionals.”

”The world’s people, and the connections amongst us, provide the raw material for cognitive surplus. The technology will continue to improve, and the population will continue to grow, but change in the direction of more participation has already happened. What matters most now is our imaginations. The opportunity before us, individual and collectively, is enormous; what we do with it will be determined largely by how well we are able to imagine and reward public creativity, participation and sharing.”

Non-fiction: business
Useful
216 pages

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