More specifically, it comes down to the cognitive surplus described by New York University writer in residence Clay Shirky, in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” but outlined even more clearly in his TED talk “How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World.”
Shirky’s basic premise is that the Internet affords the “ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global projects.”
Now, that’s the big view.
On a smaller scale, cognitive surplus is:
1. The world’s free time and talents
2. Our ability to produce, rather than merely consume, content.
“The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” as Shirky says. For the purpose of his TED talk, he identifies LOLcats as the stupidest possible creative act. It takes little effort. It generally has a wide audience. And it’s everywhere.
We could be using our cognitive surplus and the freedom afforded by the Internet as an outlet for our content by, say, producing quality content. I’m working on fantasy novels. But they’re hard. In the meantime, I blog and share funny and stupid stuff on social media with friends who also generally favor funny and stupid stuff.
But just as the harmless stuff we do – quoting MASH episodes, amusing each other with obscure references from Bloom County and other aspects of shared culture – is easy, so is the less-than-nice stuff that goes on online.
Thus the weird and stupid crapola we now see on the Internet.
Conor Friedersdorf, writing at The Atlantic, is in a way asking us to consider our use of cognitive surplus as we interact with a great sink of cognitive surplus: Online shaming. He writes:
I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this. Imagine that a man sitting at a nearby table spilled his coffee, got a phone call just afterward, and simply left, so that staff had to clean up his mess, a scene that culminated in a haggard-looking barista drooping her shoulders in frustration. Was the call a true emergency? We don’t know. But if not, almost everyone would agree that the man behaved badly.
Yet almost all of you would react with discomfort or opprobrium if I followed the man back to his office, learned his name, spent a half hour waiting to see his boss, adopted an outraged tone, explained his transgression, felt righteous, then commenced a week-long mission to alert his extended network of friends, family, and professional contacts to his behavior, all the while telling masses of strangers about it, too.
On the other hand, if that man spilled his coffee, leaving that same haggard barista to clean it up, and if I captured the whole thing on my phone camera and posted it to Twitter with a snarky comment about the need to better respect service workers, some nontrivial percentage of the public would help make the clip go viral, join in the shaming, and expend effort to “snitch-tag” various people in the man’s personal life. Some would quietly raise an eyebrow at my role in that public shaming, but I mostly wouldn’t be treated as a transgressor.
One cannot help but wonder whether there are better norms. The internet isn’t restoring what was lost when we left the village, but today’s version is eroding the compensating benefit of getting to live fluidly across domains, in part because digital norms seem uninterested in protecting it.
Snark and shame are mediocre commodities, easily created and easily shared online. And snark and shame can come from the simplest thing: Our outrage that someone else on the internet doesn’t think like we do.*
But we’re seeing more and more proof that this kind of sink for our cognitive surplus is generally unhelpful, and often incomplete and frequently deceptive.
We score snark points. Yay for us!
But as Friedersdorf laments, we lose a lot in the execution, because our ability to compartmentalize (and here I’ll quibble and say we should not have norms that deviate so much from one compartment to the next that a breach in containment will result in irreparable damage) our lives is eroding. Make one slip-up that doesn’t fit with the prevailing digital norms, and you’re dead meat.
“Each day on Twitter one person is the star,” wrote a wise person, probably on Twitter. “The goal each day is to not be it.”
A parallel axiom, also likely from Twitter: “The internet can give you your fifteen minutes of fame, even if you don’t want it.”
So good luck with that. There’s a lot of cognitive surplus out there waiting to make you an unwitting star.
It would be good for us to remember what Edward R. Murrow said about Senator Joseph McCarthy:
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Good night, and good luck.”
*Even the use of this comic has the chance of spurring outrage in some of the more brittle communities. The same artists write and draw the BC comic strip, once written and drawn by Johnny Hart, who let his Christianity bleed from the church domain into the comic strip domain a bit too often to keep the peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment