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? ;-)

My estwhile colleague, the excellent David Gauntlett, has posted a new video about the work towards his next book Making is Connecting:

The video argues that certain forms of digital/social media practise offer the hope of personal and communal redemption. When we publish stuff or make things online or get together with others in a common cause online to do practical things, then the value of that activity goes beyond the intrinsic value of whatever artefact is produced: we’re connecting with other people and increasing our social capital. We’re making ourselves happier as a consequence and establishing or reinforcing communities that might do social good. Becoming a member of wikipedia or getting together with others to do some guerilla gardening are new opportunities that help us get over the cultural, spiritual and social slump that constituted C20th mass media. That era is characterised as one of consumption rather than creation, the renewed promise of the C21st through the magic of digital.

I love all this and a big part of me would like to leave this post here. But then I’d have to rename this blog twopointhappyclappy. This is terribly unfair, I know, given that Gauntlett’s book is only half-finished. but meh.

My main issue is that I’m tempted to say ‘so what?’

So what if some people become more happy, productive, social as a consequence of this? That’s all lovely but there’s no challenge to power in any of this. There’s no real change to the world. The mandarins at Whitehall aren’t going to be shaking in their boots. I imagine the scene:

Bernard (rushes in breathless): Sir Humphrey!?

Sir Humphrey (for it is he): Yes, Bernard (arches a brow)

Bernard: It’s the internet people, sir. They’re making things!

Sir Hunphrey: What’s this? Barricades across the Mall? Million man marches into Parliament Square?

Bernard: No, sir. It’s something different.. It’s…

Sir Humphrey (exasperated): Spit it out, Bernard.

Bernard: They’re making community gardens on disused land and infographics about motorway jams.

Sir Humphrey (sighs): Oh, Bernard. Why on earth do you think we spent all that money on data.gov.uk?

Getting people involved in creative community and personal projects is clearly a good thing. I have no argument with that. I agree that this change will probably make things better. And happier. But I want more better. An intelligent networked commons has the opportunity to make government, parliament, business and international affairs work differently: to be more accountable, changeable and responsive; to empower people to do as much as they can, and find other people so they can do more; possibly wreak radical change to the whole system*. I feel a little short-changed by Gauntlett’s account, in short. I think our expectations can and ought to be higher.

picture credit: Kelly Sue

*(I remain vague on this — sorry)

I’m not sure whether the stats prove an uncomplicated victory for social search and crowdsourced problem-solving, for a start. I’ve really no idea which service produces better answers, being one issue. It probably depends on the question. ‘What’s a good Italian restaurant in Cardiff?’ will work well with the Yahoo! model because it has a wider reach. On the other hand, you might not want to trust folk wisdom for a solution to matters that require a specialised knowledge.

It does show that a free-for-all, give-and-take knowledge source is very addictive and, presumably, helpful enough. Involving people like Stephen Hawking and Oprah Winfrey bought Yahoo! a vital share of attention Google never bothered with. Also, as Brady Forrest points out, Yahoo!‘s model could scale organically, while Google’s required the recruitment and vetting of answerers, a time-consuming and distracting business.

Is this victory analagous to what will happen in the battle between the Wikipedia and the Britannica? It seems very similar on face value. Not entirely, though, since their business models are different: Wikipedia survives on charitable donations and drubbing the opposition when it comes to traffic is not nearly as helpful as it has been to Yahoo!

[I interviewed Steven Taylor, RVP of Yahoo! UK here, back in August and he talked a little about the Answers service]

If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls “the wisdom of crowds” comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value.

Other examples which are sometimes cited include digg, Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia and del.icio.us. People come together to solve problems and their combined effort produces better results than an individual editor or news team could manage.

However, we’re actually smudging together two contrasting decision-making mechanisms here. Henry Jenkins points out in a post related to game design that there’s a significant difference between Pierre Levy’s idea of Collective Intelligence and James Surowiecki’s topic, The Wisdom of Crowds.

The Wisdom of Crowds emerges when data from a number of sources is aggregated. The people contributing need to be acting autonomously according to the best of their ability and in competition with others. The famous example is guessing the weight of the prize bull: the average of people’s guesses turns out to be the correct answer.

Collective Intelligence, on the other hand, emerges through deliberation, where people share, alter and evaluate other’s contributions to arrive at common ground.

As Jenkins notes, Wikipedia is much closer to this second model, Collective Intelligence, than the Wisdom of Crowds approach that finds the mathematical mean of all the suggested ‘answers’. The same would be true of Yahoo! Answers and del.icio.us, and indeed of most Web 2.0 applications that revolve around a community approach.

The Wisdom of Crowds model does in some ways apply, however, to things like the digg front page**, flickr interestingness and Google PageRank, which are algorithmically determined based on the combined anonymous and competitive input of many people.

It isn’t really a question of one of these models being better than the other, Jenkins concludes. It’s more that we’re not going to get very far unless we realise that they are two different things:

Both “collective intelligence” and “the wisdom of crowds” offer productive models for game design but we will get nowhere if we confuse the two. They represent very different accounts for knowledge production in the digital age and they will result in very different design choices.

I’d contend that the approach chosen by an application designer very much depends on the nature of the problem that is being addressed. Both could be correct depending on the situation, and probably one approach would be more sensible than the other for any given application. Completely anonymous postings to Wikipedia with no editing hierarchy whatsoever probably wouldn’t be such a great plan, though it would bring it closer to the wisdom of crowds model. On the other hand, the collective intelligence method of measured deliberation and discussion about which stories to put on the front page of digg or which sites should appear at the top of Google searches probably wouldn’t work out too well either.

[**Actually, digg is interesting in this regard. The submission of stories is not anonymous, nor is the voting. This has led to lots of accusations of bloc voting, allegations of a self-reinforcing elite of top diggers, and adjustments to the promotion algorithm to try to prevent this. It is a strange amalgam of social community and wise-crowds news aggregator. The owners (and presumably enough of the users) want it that way. If the owners didn’t want the social community aspect, and the problems that has created, they’d remove all mention of user names and make voting anonymous. It’s my belief that the gaming aspect to digg is entirely intentional and part of what appears to make it so addictive to its fans.]

A branch of the project is devoted to children’s books, WikiJunior, where you’ll find books about things like the solar system, big cats and the Kings and Queens of England. There are also things like A-level and GCSE textbooks, lots of computer science stuff and hundred of others. The community votes on which new books to develop, though looking at the history of many pages, a lot of the books are the creation of one enthusiast with corrections and additions from others. Wikibooks appears to be a considerably more sedate and good-natured bunch than the wikipedia crowd, with little evidence of the edit-wars, vandalism and obsessive nitpicking that characterises some of the more controversial wikipedia items. Perhaps this is because the project is less well-known, with a smaller community. Perhaps it’s because books are typically big things that require a lot of work and so command some respect.

The aims of the project, like wikipedia, are to democratise and spread knowledge and information. Traditional publishers, say the organisers, fail to recognise merit because their business models rely on creating best-sellers and so they’re risk-averse:

Traditional publishing houses make the bulk of their income from re-issues of classic books, new books by authors with long track records, or celebrities who are famous in their own right. The chances of a truly good new work being published solely on the basis of merit skyrocket when you overturn the traditional business model and tap the wellspring of new talent out there using the ‘net.

With this project we have reached a crossroad between the books of yesterday, and the encyclopedia of everything for tomorrow. Simply by reading this book and telling your friends, you have advanced the cause of free access to information and of democratizing the field of publishing.

There are issues, of course. I read through the PDF version of Big Cats, which is deemed complete, available in print-format and on its way to a second edition. The information it contains appears to be accurate, well-researched and carefully written to suit a young audience. Unfortunately, though, it was a bit odd. There’s lots of half-finished edits, changes in tone and register and the layout is pretty basic. Ultimately, I wouldn’t buy it.

So what does that mean? If one of the most highly developed books available is still not good enough, is the project a failure? This is the sort of charge that’s levelled at Wikipedia: it contains incorrect information, so it’s no good.

That’s not really the right way to look at wiki projects, though. The point of wikis, in my view, is that they are always works in progress. That’s their strength and their weakness. Unlike print editions, new information can be added at any time. When Pluto ceased to be classified as a planet, thousands of books were suddenly out-of-date; Wikipedia was immediately up-to-date.

This philosophy intersects strangely with the idea of books, though. The idea of a book has connotations of completeness, correctness and authority. (Correct in the sense that we don’t expect spelling mistakes, etc.) The idea of an unfinished book is paradoxical — if it’s not complete, then in some senses it’s not yet a book.

What you’re looking at when you read pretty much any wiki project is not something analagous to anything produced on a printing press. It is a palimpsest. The Romans wrote on wax tablets that could be re-used. Medieval monks wrote on vellum, a form of calf leather. If they needed new paper or made a mistake, they could peel off the current layer and write on it again. Modern scholars use ultraviolet and multispectral imaging to try to decipher the history of the page. Wikis lay this process bare. The ghosts of previous versions, previous authors, can be seen in the crookedness of the edits; its history page provides an X-Ray of its genesis. Portents of its future are on the discussion pages: some of these prophecies will come to pass while others will be forgotten.

WikiBooks might thus be viewed as the ultimate in post-modern writing. Derrida and Barthes talked about books having a ‘magic tablet’ quality. That there were other meanings and expressions hiding beneath the surface:

The Palimpsest introduces the idea of erasure as part of a layering process. There can be a fluid relationship between these layers. Texts and erasures are superimposed to bring about other texts or erasures. A new erasure creates text; a new text creates erasure.

The “oddness” of Wikibooks is only apparent in the print and PDF versions. To publish them in these formats runs directly against the nature of its progenitor. Wiki pages are liquid; they exist at this moment in time, and they are always moving through time as edits and changes accrete continually. When those moments are frozen, captured into a snapshot, it’s like taking a still from a film. We know that the future and past of that picture already exists, but we can only guess at it.

(found through Derek Wenmoth’s fab education blog)

But basically, it says that, of 5300 participants:

77% of these buyers have little or no experience of with social networks. The report suggests that these people are still using the web to “get” information and that the “giving back” part of social networking might make them uncomfortable.

On the other hand, 86% of respondents said they were familiar with wikis, and more than 50% are weekly wiki visitors. 52% stated that wikis influenced their purchasing decisions.

Interestingly, the only wiki mentioned in the report as an example was Wikipedia, highlighting that the importance and influence of the online encyclopaedia goes far beyond its apparent status as a neutral reference tool. While it (thankfully) doesn’t carry product reviews, one can only presume that articles covering competing technologies and IT strategies are extremely influential.

Two recent social networks have been launched specifically for techies: Aggreg8 from Microsoft and, closer to home, the new ZDNet.co.uk communities endeavour. Would it have been a better idea to produce wiki-inspired features instead? Well, maybe, except, like most of us, IT buyers are most likely to be passive rather than active users: only 6% said they regularly contributed to wikis.

Wikipedia, the “encyclopedia” whose “editors” are mostly unqualified teenagers and young adults is touted by Google as an authoritative source of information. In search results, it is placed well ahead of sources of veritable information such as universities, government institutions, the home pages of recognized experts, the online full-text content of peer-reviewed professional and scholarly publications, real encyclopedias (such as the Encarta), and so on.

MySpace whose 110 million users are predominantly prepubescent and adolescents now dictates what Websites will occupy the first search results in Google’s search results. It is very easy to spam MySpace. It is considered by some experts to be a vast storehouse of link farms masquerading as “social networks”.

Google has vested, though unofficial and unannounced and, therefore, undisclosed interests in both Wikipedia and MySpace. Wikipedia visitors end up on various properties whose search technology is Google’s and Wikipedia would have shriveled into insignificance had it not been to Google’s relentless promotion of its content.

I’m not totally convinced by all of this. Though I do see the main point. I just don’t think it’s an issue.

(a) I’m not sure what Google’s vested interest is supposed to be in Wikipedia. I haven’t ever heard it mentioned before. However, we’ve all probably noticed that a Wikipedia link tends to be the first or second result on Google searches. I took that to indicate that people were linking to Wikipedia a lot, because it’s an easy way to gloss unfamiliar terms. The average net user probably doesn’t bother with academic publications and real [sic] encyclopaedias.

(b) I don’t know who these ‘experts’ are that say MySpace is a link-farm. I hadn’t noticed that.

© The age of MySpacers is in dispute, despite what Dr Vaknin says. Also, Google’s interest in MySpace is very much disclosed.

(d) No numerical evidence about the MySpace link is presented at all. No evidence for the claims about Wikipedians being teenage.

Ultimately, this piece smacks me as a bit paranoid. Young people use the web a lot and create a lot of content. Google works by measuring value through in-bound links. Of course young people are going to end up influencing search results.

P.S. There seems to be some sort of ongoing feud between Vaknin and Wikipedia. See here and here.

(via. Micropersuasion)

The grand social experiment that is sites like Digg and Wikipedia star[t]ed out with simple and noble ideals, in that order, but have steadily decreased in quality and competence to become a running joke, and home to the dregs of the internet. They are the domain of the disenfranchised stupid, the virtual corner bar for the loud portion of the ignorant set, and are quickly drowning out any voices of reason that try and counter the stupidity. Welcome to Web 2.0, short may it reign.

Needless to say, the evidence given is slight. The main problem with digg, apparently, is that two of Charlie Demerjian’s (the author’s) articles were removed after being reported as lame. Despite having received lots of intelligent comments, the author says this means that people who use digg are mainly “the disenfranchised stupid”. Since he thinks that they are “dumber than rocks”, it’s not entirely surprising that his articles annoyed loyal digg users, is it? I would suggest that he stops submitting his anti-digg stories to the service, unless this is some sort of elaborate trolling. Perhaps Netscape or reddit users might be a little more receptive?

Wikipedia is tarred with the same brush. Needless to say, though, no examples or other evidence are given to support the accusation.

I don’t think that even the proudest champion of Web 2.0 would claim that either of these sites are without problems. A lot of them are admitted by their owners, and have been covered here in earlier posts. The thing is, they are also quite good as they are, and are continuously evolving to become better.

We are in a period of experimentation — mistakes and false-starts are inevitable. The Inquirer’s comments are the equivalent of telling Edison to stop messing about with this electricity thing when his first light bulb popped.

Comedian Stephen Colbert coined the phrase in a skit about Bush’s decision to invade Iraq (video here):

And that brings us to tonight’s word: truthiness.

Now I’m sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster’s, are gonna say, “Hey, that’s not a word.” Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true, or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.

Later, moving from the mainstream to social media, he expanded the theme onto the susceptibility of Wikipedia to vandalism. (*sigh* the video is here). Out of character, Colbert told the Onion AV Club, “Truthiness is tearing our country apart … Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country.”

I don’t think it’s too much to guess that he’s talking about WMDs and Osama. It means false-trust, stuff that sounds right to people but hasn’t been proven.

The American Dialect Society, the wordanista mafia, obviously felt the power of this. They selected ‘truthiness’ as their word of the year for 2005 on January 6 2006.

Back to citizen journalism, the Wikpedia slur has gained ground. ‘Truthy’ is almost always a slur. It’s drawing a massive and unwarranted divide between trained journalists, who always get it right, and bloggers, who fail at this abysmally. (can Google do sarcasm yet?).

And this is where those of us who care run into difficulties. On the one hand, many of us instinctively feel that citizen media is the way forward. Journalism is too often an old-boys’ network. Influenced by the demands of advertisers and political funding, the editorial policy of almost any commercial news organisation seems tainted. Class, gender and race agendas can delete alternative voices. And as Mark Schneider reports, there’s nothing intrinsically more truthful or trustworthy about the news you read in mainstream media:

News editors for the most part rightly assume that if the originating producer is credible, the story is credible. One might view this as a kind of “delegated trust”, obviating the need for fine-grained fact-checking or re-interviewing news sources. It certainly saves a lot of time and money. And for the most part, this shared universe of trusting belief rarely creates embarrassment for its members.

The days of ‘three independent sources’ for any news story are over, thanks to Murdoch and the pressures of having two journalists produce ten stories a day. It’s not their fault, but journalists have been undermined. Nonetheless, someone employed by a media agency of some sort is assumed to have papal infallibility over time. They are journalists, they have press cards, so obviously they check facts, get three independent sources and report alternative points of view. Yeah, right. We have all read and seen such biased, unresearched crap in mainstream media that I don’t think any educated person really believes that any more.

And then there’s the other side of the coin, Colbert’s wikiality and truthiness. Some guy posts that it’s America’s 750th year of Independence (they didn’t — but it’s the best piece of satire I’ve seen all year and I want you to read it — come back in a minute, eh?). Can we just make stuff up? It’s on the web, some other guys link to it saying it’s true, so it has to be true, right? People start to believe it. Back in the mainstream. Somebody makes up a reason to invade another country. They get the press to spread it, and they will because that someone is newsworthy to the mainstream. That’s dreadful too. It’s in the mainstream and it’s in the blogosphere. A shared universe is a question of trust. And who do you want to trust? Two shared universes collide in the debate between citizen and mainstream journalism.

Recently, Seth Finkelstein wanted to do some research into the recent ‘non-lethal arms to be used on US civilians’ story. He had a hunch that the story wasn’t quite true. Then, in a shock ‘blogger-does-more-than-write-about-others’-views’ move, he actually did some work that he wasn’t paid for. He phoned the military, obtaining a transcript from the Defense Writers Group. What the transcript proves IMHO is that military tacticians should *never* speak to any kind of press, badged or otherwise. They are just too cold. But Seth ultimately feels his time was wasted — his research wasn’t going to get mainstream coverage — so what is he, some sort of unpaid freelancer for those who happen to find what he’s done? He’d uncovered some sort of truth, but was it truthy?

So where are we? Are we condemned to a truthy perspective? I don’t go down the ‘everything is relative’ line, because the prevailing truth is always connected to power. But maybe we always were. Hello French postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard:

Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major – perhaps the major – stake in the worldwide competition for power.

Knowledge as a commodity = truthiness. It’s a market we all have a stake in, finally. That’s the good news.

The bad news. I am also thinking about Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars. He says a successful marketer (publisher, journalist, blogger, advertiser) finds a story that fits their audience’s world view. I am scared by this book, though I know a lot of what he writes is correct (some of his other books are more empowering). We can’t just give up on more truthful, though, even if we are all truthy.

To wrap up and get things back to what’s real now, the big deal is checks and balances. Who has the most and best of these? People who broadcast? They’re trained, full-time and might get fired in the case of a cock-up. Or maybe, when push comes to shove, it’s easier all round to brush mistakes under the carpet. Or is it people who narrowcast, like bloggers. The people who open their own truthiness to comments, debate and trackbacks, people who are picked up on mistakes (even here) in a level playing field?

We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability–including the use of real names–is expected. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

While Wikipedia has come under continuous fire for its open editing policy, most notably, perhaps in Nick Carrs’s essay The Amorality of Web 2.0, this is quite shocking news. The extent to which it is greeted by existing Wikipedia contributors and editors remains to be seen, of course.

From the FAQ:

Are you attempting to shut Wikipedia down?

No. That makes up no part of our aim. We wish instead to leverage the fantastic resource that is Wikipedia and use it to create something better.

Aha! So you are trying to outdo Wikipedia, aren’t you?

Well, of course. Why else would we be proposing a fork?

If you’re not trying to shut Wikipedia down, then what relationship do you want with Wikipedia?

A mutually complementary one, in which we occupy different social niches, as it were. Those who want to work in a system committed to the maximum empowerment of amateurs should always be able to do so on Wikipedia. Those who, by contrast, want to work shoulder-to-shoulder in a bottom-up system with experts, in which the experts are able to settle content disputes, will soon have the option of doing so on the Citizendium. Furthermore, those who want the option of working anonymously and in a wild-and-woolly atmosphere in which rules are not necessarily enforced should always be able to do so on Wikipedia. Those who, by contrast, want to take personal, real-world responsibility for their efforts, and to work in a dynamic but rule-governed environment, will soon have the option of doing so on the Citizendium.