Looking for my Cognitive Surplus

You’ll have come across the stories, talks and interviews about Clay Shirky’s new book: Cognitive Surplus.

I think that all of us get – and recognise – the basic idea. Most of us spend/waste so very much time watching television. That’s typically pretty passive. However, an increasing number of people are doing something different.

We’re online, but not surfing. We’re making. Making videos and blog posts and discussing photos and creating reviews and all sorts of mad stuff. Here’s the man himself, explaining it all:

That is good:

• It engages the brain – to a greater or lesser extent. The couch potatoes are sprouting!
• It is intrinsically social. When we create stuff, we try to find audiences for it – for feedback, reward, because it deserves it (or not) – and the best way to do that on the Web right now is to do it in a social manner. Maybe making leads to social in an intrinsic way.
• We’re making fabulous stuff as a result. The whole of Wikipedia involved 100mn man-hours. But Americans spend that amount of time watching adverts in a single weekend. Open Source is typically unpaid. The possibilities are endless!

I’ve got to broadly agree with that. Brains, making, social – they’ve got to be good things. Shirky anticipates a trillion hours a week of time that people will spend on doing good stuff apart from watching TV. Woot!

But… I feel like I’m running out of cognitive surplus since I got a new job. The same way I did in 2008 when I started my last job and every time that happened before I started blogging.

And I find I am not alone. The majority of blogs contain the expression ‘sorry for not posting’… blah blah blah I’ve got a new job. The majority of open source projects, forum communities, web memes – run dry when the main person behind them gets a job.

Bertrand Russell recognised that there was a conflict between the productive use of leisure time and working life when he wrote his fantastic essay In Praise of Idleness in 1932. He writes of a wonderful vision:

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

But Russell recognised the conflict between working and doing cool stuff in your leisure time in a way that Shirky appears to be oblivious to. Most people are knackered at the end of the day. Are so many people under-employed that this is not self-evident? (I also enjoyed this spirited defence of TV by Tess Alps, representing the concerns of commercial TV, that appeared on the Guardian website today).

So yes, cognitive surplus. Wonderful notion. And when most people’s working hours are reduced to four a day, as Russell proposed, we might genuinely start to see what those trillion hours can do. But we need time off, too.

picture credit: Karen Norburg (found here)

Update:  I meant to include this terrific quotation from Milan Kundera, but I got lazy: “Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy”. Is this a fair description of some social media enthusiasts? ;-)

Possibly related:

• More Everything
• Growth of Social Networks (or Not)
• Google Blog Search & Former Audiences