Machines Like Us

By Norm Nason

The industrial revolution created a society in which the commodity of free time became abundant. The technology revolution is creating one in which this free time is being put to productive use.

In an April 26th blog post, author Clay Shirky argued that after the industrial revolution our collective society began to have a good deal of free time on its hands. This social surplus begat of a variety of civic institutions: things like public libraries and museums, and increasingly broad education for children.

"For the first time," said Shirky, "society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before -- free time."

This social surplus created a cognitive surplus: billions of hours of otherwise useful human thinking, wasted on trivial pursuits -- most recently, the passive watching of television.

Just how big is our cognitive surplus? "If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit," said Shirky, "the whole project -- every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists -- that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought."

According to Shirky, television watching accounts for 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. We spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads."

In spite of these grim statistics, Shirky feels that our society is presently transforming from one in which the cognitive surplus is wasted, into one in which this surplus is being put to productive use -- and the internet is the key.

"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?" said Shirky. "I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. 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."

He goes even further, raising his observation to the level of a general principle: "It's better to do something than to do nothing."

The important thing about the cognitive surplus is that it is so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. If only 1 percent of the television-watching public began producing and sharing on the internet instead, that's equal to 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

Think about it.