The Cognitive Surplus

The advancement of technology has left people with an abundance of time on their hands, and in his newest book, Clay Shirky calls it a “Cognitive Surplus”. The story goes something like this: back in the day, when people got bored, they drank. A lot. Then the industrial revolution came around, and people were busier than ever. Finally, technology progressed, enabling shorter workdays and time to consume the fruits of technological advancement, for example, television.

Television

A lot of people think that TV is a waste of time. They resent its brain-dead nature; they believe that it’s a channel for social conditioning and that it generally makes the world a worse place. Shirky himself says that if we redirected our TV watching hours to acts of creation, we could produce the equivalent of 100 Wikipedias per year. Jeez. Fuck TV, right? But it’s actually not so black and white.

To understand why not, it helps to understand what motivates humans.

People have individual drives and group drives. Drawing on the same concepts as Dan Pink and his book Drive (and this awesome animated talk), Shirky notes that people, as individuals, want a sense of autonomy as well as a feeling of competence. In other words, they want to choose what they do and then they want to be good at it. Competence is conducive to a state of flow, and autonomy, or self-direction, is the opposite of learned helplessness – which, as we know from Martin Seligman’s classic Learned Optimism, is equivalent to depression. And as group members, people aspire to group membership and generosity. One of the reasons that giving things away feels good is because it activates the generosity reward centers of our brain. And one of the reasons we enjoy compliments is because they may enhance our self-concept of being a member of a group: compliments raise our social status. One study indicated that people are more respective of airport directives if the signs actually picture humans instead of plain symbology: this draws on explanations of social proof, socially (human) constructed realities, and wanting to adhere to social (group) norms.

Online collaboration, à la Wikipedia, is a socially positive phenomenon ultimately explainable by new opportunities piggybacking on timeless motives. Wikipedians get to feel autonomous when they choose what to work on, competent in their area of expertise, generous with their time, and a sense of group belonging.

New “social media” is two-way communication, and harkens to the more real roots of human culture: a culture of sharing and interaction (think tribal dances, or fast-forward to audience participation on YouTube). You’d think that TV, on the other hand, is a one-way communication with its culture of receiving (being a couch potato, streamed programming chosen by advertisers and satellite dish owners). But once again the social lens elucidates. One of the more interesting ways that TV affects us is that some people actually turn it into a two-way process. Seeing their favorite characters on TV alleviates a sense of loneliness and allows them to experience group membership without having to be in the physical presence of other beings. In that way it can be viewed as participatory culture, especially with the advent of online discussion forums (e.g. Lostpedia, OfficeTally).

So maybe we shouldn’t go ahead and assume that TV is destroying our capacity for Wikipedia-creation (and I do realize that 100 Wikipedias is “just” a concrete illustration of an abstract mathematical relationship, but metaphors also bear concrete implications). Maybe we should instead figure out ways that less skilled people can achieve a sense of belonging while making a substantial social contribution that benefits everyone, and not just group members. Maybe a free social mechanical turk, with a leaderboard, for use by non-profits?

I am reminded of how in Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely demonstrates that people are willing to do huge favors for each other in social contexts, even without invoking the principle of reciprocity: they are motivated by pure generosity. But it’s possible the joy is actually derived from being perceived as generous instead of the generosity itself. For example, I might give you a ride home every day from the kindness of my heart, with no expectation for compensation or any other indebtedness – but if you then offer to pay me $1 per ride, I will feel that you are taking advantage of me. Instead of getting the payment of being perceived as generous (cash equivalent… $50? a better deal for me?), I am getting paid an insultingly low wage.

The social brain can be a key to understanding human behavior. So the next time you’re puzzled by some quirk in human nature, ask if there’s a social explanation.

Social Apps

Drawing on the above insights, Clay provides some hints for the intelligent cultivation of social web apps:

1. Start small
2. Behavior follows an opportunity for social or personal advancement
3. Default to social: del.icio.us succeeded where other online bookmarking services had failed because bookmarking was public from day one
4. It is more difficult to groom a community of 100 users than 12 users, and easier to maintain a community of 1000 users than one of 100 users
5. Through the law of large numbers, there are lots of people with diverse interests, and they will find each other through the internet
6. Intimacy doesn’t scale
7. Support a supportive, self-moderating culture
8. Faster to learn, sooner to adapt: this plays on Customer Development concepts
9. Success creates more problems than failure
10. Clarity is violence: Get away from functional fixedness; leave the rules open and learn from what people choose to do with the tools you built for them
11. Try anything and try everything (and hope for black swan events!)

LINK: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age is available on Amazon.

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