Looking for my Cognitive SurplusLooking for my Cognitive Surplus

You’ll have come across the stories, talks and inter­views about Clay Shirky’s new book: Cognitive Surplus.

I think that all of us get – and recog­nise – the basic idea. Most of us spend/​waste so very much time watching tele­vi­sion. That’s typ­ic­ally pretty passive. However, an increasing number of people are doing some­thing different.

We’re online, but not surfing. We’re making. Making videos and blog posts and dis­cussing photos and creating reviews and all sorts of mad stuff. Here’s the man himself, explaining it all:

That is good:

• It engages the brain – to a greater or lesser extent. The couch potatoes are sprouting!
• It is intrins­ic­ally social. When we create stuff, we try to find audi­ences for it — for feedback, reward, because it deserves it (or not) — and the best way to do that on the Web right now is to do it in a social manner. Maybe making leads to social in an intrinsic way.
• We’re making fabulous stuff as a result. The whole of Wikipedia involved 100mn man-​​hours. But Americans spend that amount of time watching adverts in a single weekend. Open Source is typ­ic­ally unpaid. The pos­sib­il­ities are endless!

I’ve got to broadly agree with that. Brains, making, social – they’ve got to be good things. Shirky anti­cip­ates a trillion hours a week of time that people will spend on doing good stuff apart from watching TV. Woot!

But… I feel like I’m running out of cog­nitive surplus since I got a new job. The same way I did in 2008 when I started my last job and every time that happened before I started blogging.

And I find I am not alone. The majority of blogs contain the expres­sion ‘sorry for not posting’… blah blah blah I’ve got a new job. The majority of open source projects, forum com­munities, web memes — run dry when the main person behind them gets a job.

Bertrand Russell recog­nised that there was a conflict between the pro­ductive use of leisure time and working life when he wrote his fant­astic essay In Praise of Idleness in 1932. He writes of a won­derful vision:

In a world where no one is com­pelled to work more than four hours a day, every person pos­sessed of sci­entific curi­osity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excel­lent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw atten­tion to them­selves by sen­sa­tional pot-​​boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic inde­pend­ence needed for monu­mental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their pro­fes­sional work, have become inter­ested in some phase of eco­nomics or gov­ern­ment, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detach­ment that makes the work of uni­ver­sity eco­nom­ists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exas­per­atedly strug­gling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

But Russell recog­nised the conflict between working and doing cool stuff in your leisure time in a way that Shirky appears to be obli­vious to. Most people are knackered at the end of the day. Are so many people under-​​employed that this is not self-​​evident? (I also enjoyed this spirited defence of TV by Tess Alps, rep­res­enting the concerns of com­mer­cial TV, that appeared on the Guardian website today).

So yes, cog­nitive surplus. Wonderful notion. And when most people’s working hours are reduced to four a day, as Russell proposed, we might genu­inely start to see what those trillion hours can do. But we need time off, too.

picture credit: Karen Norburg (found here)

Update:  I meant to include this terrific quo­ta­tion from Milan Kundera, but I got lazy: “Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy”. Is this a fair descrip­tion of some social media enthusiasts? ;-)

Share this post:

Possibly related:

• More Everything
• Growth of Social Networks (or Not)
• Google Blog Search & Former Audiences