by Clay Shirky

(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.

http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html