The lecture is entitled "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus," and here are some key excerpts, starting with a recent conversation Shirky had with a television producer about Wikipedia:
She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? 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. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society (...)
So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."
At least they're doing something.
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? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now 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. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.(...)
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?
This is the vast level of transformation that a real movement carries with it: not only are we changing our relationships to existing cultural institutions, but our patterns of thought are actually changing. This is a vast expanse in culture and media production on a scale never before seen in human history. Far, far more people are becoming cultural and media producers rather than just consumers. Importantly, as Shirky notes, the change is massive even if there is only a 1% shift away from television toward the Internet among the already online population.
I would also like to address two of the objections commenters have brought against the "medium is the movement" formulation. First, some have argued that since Internet access is still limited mainly to wealthier people in wealthier nations, it isn't a truly democratizing force. While this is obviously true, it is also true that new technologies are always first introduced among the wealthier people in wealthier nations, but that expansion always occurs as the technology becomes cheaper. There were times in America when not everyone had a telephone, but now everyone does. There were times when not everyone had a television, but not just about everyone who wants one does. And much the same can be said about electricity, indoor plumbing, or the radio. With the right public policy and the inexorable lowering of cost of the technology, the same thing will continue to happen to the high-speed, network-neutral Internet. Eventually, it will be virtually universal, too. Just because the technology isn't 100% democratizing right away is not a flaw as long as it continues to become available to an increasing number of people.
Second, is the movement about the people, or about the technological space? Personally, I don't find that to be a very interesting question, since it is obviously about the people interacting with the technological space. The movement would not be possible unless there were both, and both are changed by each other. However, if I am forced to choose a side, I will say that since people have been around for a really long time, but the high-speed, network neutral Internet is a little less than twenty years old, I am going to have to identify the technology as the primary catalyst for the new change. This is why I think the "medium is the movement" formulation is, while crude and obviously playing off Marshall McLuhan, is an accurate enough formulation to start this discussion. But really, people are changed by the social, institutional, and technological spaces in which they operate, and technological spaces don't do anything at all unless people interact with them. There is no clear line separating these concepts into discrete categories.
Also, check out the great discussion on Shirky's lecture at Making Light. Open Left will have more on this in the coming days. |
