EdL 755 - Cognitive Surplus review

Clay Shirky begins his book, Cognitive Surplus, by making an analogy between English gin consumption in the early 1700s and American television consumption post World War II. Television itself was not the problem for Americans, Shirky assures readers, but itself a reaction to Americans’ excess of free time and diminished social circles. At this point, Shirky begins contrasting social media, a wholly interactive and networked medium, with the static albatross that is television. He asks readers to “imagine treating the free time of the world’s educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus” (Shirky, 2010, p. 9). He presents this free time as a social asset that can be harnessed for productive projects like Wikipedia or squandered watching television. He points out that teens and young adults are watching less television than previous generations and that a subtle but prevalent shift is beginning in the way Americans consume media. People are beginning to employ “new communications tools to do jobs older media simply can’t do” (p. 15), writes Shirky, invoking as an example Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing website developed to map Kenyan violence in the wake of a controversial December 2007 election.

Shirky never uses the term crowdsourcing, which has long been part of journalistic vernacular, but he examines its tenets throughout the book. The crowdsourcing model allows news organizations or companies to harness the production of many volunteers to replace or enhance the work of a limited number of professionals. On the positive side, relying on volunteers who donate their free time has allowed “news outlets do things that would otherwise be impractical, such as searching through troves of documents looking for interesting material” (“The people,” 2011). In the future, there may not be many journalists earning salaries as their primary career, but everyone can be a journalist in his or her free time. Social media is destroying journalism while revolutionizing it and redefining what it means to be a journalist. Shirky argues that “providing professional content isn’t the only job we’ve been hiring media to do” (p. 19), seemingly acknowledging that amateur content may not adequately replace hard news or investigative journalism. However, he does not discuss the ramifications of the hard news void slowly growing in the media landscape. As news becomes less researched and more user driven, people dig in their ideological heels, accept opinion as fact, and may be falling down a collective slippery slope where more information means less knowledge. Shirky acknowledges that all crowdsourcing projects are not academic or even productive, but he does not address what this shift in media consumption may mean for the knowledge of the American electorate.

Another ramification of this shift toward crowdsourcing is addressed when Shirky examines digital sharecropping. In this new, collaborative, cognitive surplus-harnessing media landscape, “the revenue goes not to the content creators but to the owners of the platform that enables the sharing” (p. 57). Shirky relates a story about volunteers for America Online suing AOL in 1999 for profiting from their unpaid labor. More than a decade later, this issue has become more extreme and more prevalent.  Huffington Post bloggers recently sued it and AOL, which purchased the site for $315 million, for treating them like digital sharecroppers and not sharing the fruits of their digital labor (Katz, 2011).  Shirky does not come down hard enough of this practice, instead viewing it as part of a larger shift in the way that new generations view and interact with media. “One function of the market,” he argues, “is to provide platforms for us to engage in the things we value doing outside of the market” (p. 60). His logic can be readily applied to most of his examples, like Facebook, which does seem to facilitate activities – discussing current events, sharing photographs, reconnecting with people – that people want to do anyway. It is more difficult and worrisome, especially in the age of content farms, to apply this to all human endeavors. Marginalizing all writers and all content by lumping journalism in with Facebook posts contributes to the growing wealth disparity in American society. Using Shirky’s model, the cognitive surplus of the average American will eventually be diminished as he or she has to work two or three jobs make ends meet.

Shirky eventually devotes part of his text to examining the ramifications of new media and social networking on education. Here he relates an interesting history of the Invisible College, a group of scientists and academics who met in random locations and communicated with letters in the mid-1600s. Shirky relates that “within a few years, several members of the Invisible College had produced advances in chemistry, biology, astronomy, and optics” (p. 137) by fostering a collaborative and competitive atmosphere. He goes on to explain the conditions of sharing information and to praise new tools that enable more effective sharing on a larger scale and create products like the Linux operating system. Shirky contrasts this acceptance of collaboration for the greater good with an anecdote involving a freshman engineering student attending Ryerson University in 2007 who started a Facebook study group for chemistry students. To his credit, Shirky paints a nuanced picture of the Ryerson situation by invoking the concept of free riders. He asks or implies many difficult questions facing modern educators: Can educators ever expect a student’s individual work to be done completely in isolation? How can an online study group of 146 members avoid the type of freeloaders that a traditional study group can easily identify and expel? When does sharing knowledge become cheating? Shirky provides no easy answers, acknowledging that education is “less about getting the right answer than learning the right techniques” (p. 148) while arguing that “learners who share their observations and frustrations with their peers learn faster and retain more of what they’ve learned than those who study alone” (p. 149). The school eventually struck a balance between expelling the student and absolving his behavior by downgrading him on one particular assignment. Shirky seems to support this type of balanced approach but argues that schools need to establish progressive policies rather than take reactionary punitive measures.   

In his final chapter, Shirky tries to draw conclusions from the myriad of ideas considered in his book. However, precise inferences are difficult to resolve because “the bigger the opportunity offered by new tools, the less completely anyone can extrapolate the future from the previous shape of society” (p. 189). This paradox is at the heart of Shirky’s book as his historical references and modern observations do not always fully connect, routinely drawing out more questions than answers. The title of the final chapter, “Looking for the mouse,” highlights the rapid change and shifting cultural expectations that are a theme of his writing. While children a few years ago may have expected to find a computer mouse to control a television or projector screen, they may now expect every screen to be manipulated like their iPad or smartphone by simply touching the screen rather than using a mouse. While TVs a few years ago may not have allowed any interactivity, most high-end models are now being shipped with internet access and apps from GoogleTV or other services. While Shirky’s book cannot predict all trends or provide all answers, it does raise many interesting questions that allow readers to draw their own conclusions about an exciting, unpredictable future.

References

Katz, B. (2011, April 12). AOL, Huffington Post sued by unpaid blogger. Reuters.com. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/12/huffington-lawsuit-idUSN1216794620110412

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. London: The Penguin Group.

The people formerly known as the audience. (2011, July 7). Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/node/18904124?story_id=18904124&fsrc=rss