Cognitive Surplus (2010) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Quotes edit see section history

• “In the 1720s, London was busy getting drunk. Really drunk....It isn't hard to figure out why people were drinking gin. It is palatable and intoxicating, a winning combination, especially when a chaotic world can make sobriety seem overrated. Gin drinking provided a coping mechanism for people suddenly thrown together in the early decades of the industrial age.... Industrialization didn't just create new ways of working, it created new ways of living, because the relocation of the population destroyed ancient habits common to country living, while drawing so many people together that the new density of the population broke the older urban models as well.”

• “The cumulative free time in the postwar United States began to add up to billions of collective hours per year....So what did we do with all that time? Mostly, watch TV. We had so much free time to burn and so few other appealing ways to burn it that every citizen in the developed world took to watching television as if it were a duty. TV quickly took up the largest chunk of our free time: an average of over twenty hours a week worldwide....For most people most of the time, watching TV is the activity....The sitcom has been our gin, an infinitely expandable response to the crisis of social transformation, and as with drinking gin, it isn't hard to explain why people watch individual television programs—some of them are quite good. What's hard to explain is how....watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. Toxicologists like to say "The dose make the poison"; both alcohol and caffeine are fine in moderation but fatal in excess.”

• “The social uses of our new medial tools have been a big surprise, in part because the possibility of these uses wasn't implicit in the tools themselves....But the use of a social technology is much less determined by the tool itself; when we use a network, the most important asset we get is access to one another. We want to be connected to one another, a desire that the social surrogate of television deflects, but one that our use of social media actually engages.”

• “A handful of people, working with cheap tools and little time or money to spare, managed to carve out enough collective goodwill from the community to create a resource that no one could have imagined even five years ago. Like all good stories, the story of Ushahidi holds several different lessons: People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to. Access to cheap, flexible tools removes many of the barriers to trying new things. You don't need fancy computers to harness cognitive surplus; simple phones are enough. But one of the most important lessons is this: once you've figured out how to tap the surplus in a way that people care about, others can replicate your technique, over and over, around the world.”

• “The simple act of creating something with others in mind and then sharing it with them represents, at the very least, an echo of that older model of culture, now in technological raiment. Once you accept the idea that we actually like making and sharing things, however dopey in content or poor in execution, and that making one another laugh is a different kind of activity from being made to laugh by people paid to make us laugh, then in some ways the Cartoon Network is a low-grade substitute for lolcats.”

• “The old view of online as a separate space, cyberspace, apart from the real world, was an accident of history....Our social media tools aren't an alternative to real life, they are part of it. In particular, they are increasingly the coordinating tools for events in the physical world.”

• “Old logic, television logic, treated audiences as little more than collections of individuals. Their members didn't create any real value for one another. The logic of digital media, on the other hand, allows the people formerly know as the audience to create value for one another every day.”

• “Learning on the job may seem opposed to the desire to feel competent, but competence is a moving target. Taking on a job that is too large and complex can be demoralizing, but taking on a job that is so simple that it presents few challenges can be dull and demoralizing. The feeling of competence is often best engaged by working right at the edge of one's abilities. The feeling that I did this myself and it's good, often beats the feeling that Professionals did this for me and it's perfect.”

• “I'd seen the amount of work that went into designing a usable website....and I knew that a bunch of amateurs could not even approximate the quality of what professional designers were creating. No one would want to have their own mediocre page, when there was all of this professional work being put on the web at the same time....What I hadn't understood was that design quality wasn't the sole metric for a webpage, Webpages don't just have quality, they have qualities, plural. Clarity of design is obviously good, but other qualities, like the satisfaction of making something on your own or learning while doing, can trump it....Creating something personal, even of moderate quality, has a different kind of appeal than consuming something made by others, even something of high quality....I bet that amateurs would never want to do anything other than consume. (That was the last time I ever made that mistake.)”

• “If you give people a way to act on their desire for autonomy and competence or generosity and sharing, they might take you up on it....however, if you only pretend to offer an outlet for those motivations, while actually slotting people into a scripted experience, they may well revolt.”

• “Now the barriers are low enough that any of us can publicly seek and join with like-minded souls. The means for harnessing our cognitive surplus are the new tools we have been given, tools that both enable and reward participation. Our motivations for using those tools are the ancient, intrinsic ones, motivations previously remanded to the private sphere but now bursting out in public.”

• “Human character is the essential component of our sociable and generous behaviors, even when coordinated with high-tech tools. Interpretations of those behaviors that focus on the technology miss the point: technology enables those behaviors, but it doesn't cause them.”

• “Many of the unexpected uses of communications tools are surprising because our old beliefs about human nature were so lousy. <Daniel Kahneman called this> "theory-induced blindness": adherence to a belief about how the world works that prevents you from seeing how the world really works.”

• “As we have seen, the question, Why are all these people working for free? presupposes a theory of human action based mainly on personal and financial motivation....The problem here isn't with the behaviors, it's with the explanation. Once you stop asking why they are doing them, the whole range of intrinsic (and nonfinancial) motivation becomes part of the explanation.”

• “The hothouse environment of a collaborative circle can make the ideas and achievements of the participants develop faster than if the participants were all pursuing the identical goals without sharing. Our ability to simultaneously pursue our own goals while being mindful and supportive of other people's goals is fundamental to human life—so fundamental, in fact, that we actually have trouble turning it off.”

• “The Economics of Sharing ~ Knowledge is the most combinable thing we humans have, but taking advantage of it requires special conditions....These three conditions—community <a large enough community to share>, cost <of sharing knowledge>, and clarity <of knowledge shared>—aren't enough. Foray's fourth condition is culture, a community's set of shared assumptions about how it should go about its work, and about its members' relations with one another....Our new tools provide an opportunity to create new cultures of sharing, and only in the hands of these cultures will our ability to share become as valuable as it can be.”

• “Getting what we celebrate highlight the tension between maximizing individual freedom and maximizing social value....Neither perfect individual freedom nor perfect social control is optimal (Ayn Rand and Vladimir Lenin both overshot the mark), so it falls to us to manage the tension between individual freedom and social value, a trade-off that follows the by-now-familiar pattern of having no solution, just different optimizations that create different kinds of value, and different kinds of problems that need to be managed.”

• “Sharing thoughts and expressions and even actions with others, possibly many others, is becoming a normal opportunity, not just for professionals and experts but for anyone who wants it....The less catchy but more accurate lesson from eBay is "People will behave if they sense that there is long-term value in doing so, and short-term loss in not doing so." The greater the value and the risk inherent in participation, the more some sort of structure is required to keep the participants concentrating on their shared and sophisticated goals, rather than on their personal and basic ones....There is no one-size-fits-all set of rules for governing groups that create public value.”

• “The essential source of value right now is coming less from master strategy than from broad experimentation, because no one has a complete grasp, or even a very good one, about what the next great idea will look like. We are all living through the disorientation that comes from including two billion new participants in a media landscape previously operated by a small group of professionals. When this much has changed, our best chance for finding good ideas is to have as many groups as possible try as many things as possible. The future doesn't unfold on some preordained track; things change because someone figures out something that is possible right now, and pushes to make it happen.”

• “The bigger the opportunity offered by new tools, the less completely anyone can extrapolate the future from the previous shape of society. So it is today. The communications tools we now have, which a mere decade ago seemed to offer an improvement to the twentieth-century media landscape, are now seen to be rapidly eroding it instead. A society where everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere is a different kind of society than one where citizens approach media as mere consumers.”

• “We are absolutely terrible at predicting our own future behavior....Because we're so lousy at predicting what we will do with new communications tools before we try them, this particular revolution, like the print revolution, is being driven by overlapping experiments whose ramifications are never clear at first. Hence creating the most value from a tool involves not master plans or great leaps forward but constant trial and error.”

• “The best writers sometimes disregard the rules.”

  The Elements of Style by Strunk and White

• “—Try Anything, Try Everything”

• “Those deeply committed to old solutions cannot see how society would benefit from an approach incompatible with older models. Paradoxically, as we have seen, people committed to solving a particular problem also commit themselves to maintaining that problem in order to keep their solution viable. We can't ask people running traditional systems to evaluate a new technology for its radical benefits; people committed to keeping the current system will tend, as a group, to have trouble seeing value in anything disruptive.”

• “Proponents of the new and defenders of the old can't merely discuss the transition, because each group has systematic biases that make its overall vision untrustworthy; radicals and traditionalists start from different assumptions and usually end up talking past each other. The actual negotiated transition can happen only by letting the radicals try everything, because given their inability to predict what will happen, and given the natural braking functions of social diffusion, most of it will fail. The negotiation that matters isn't between radicals and traditionalists; instead it has to be with the citizens of the larger society, the only group who can legitimately decide how they want to live, given the new range of possibilities.”

Organizations edit see section history

• Ushahidi: Swahili for "witness" or "testimony". A website initially created to help ordinary citizens track and monitor ethnic violence in Kenya. Ushahidi has transformed into a platform that may be used by anyone to track or monitor some activity.
• PidkupPal.com: A site designed around helping people carpool.
• GrobanitesForCharity.org: Add a description of this organization.
• CouchSurfing.org: A network for travelers allowing them to stay as guests with another member rather than staying at a hotel.
• HarryPotterFanFiction.com
• Meetup.com: Network for women with postpartum depression
• PatientsLikeMe.com
• Flickr.com

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Clay Shirky (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 303.4833

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Science › Technology › Social Aspects
• Books › Science › Technology › General & Reference
• Books › Science › Technology › Technology & Society
• Books › Business & Investing › Management & Leadership › Management
• Books › Professional & Technical › Engineering › Telecommunications