The Internet – society’s saviour or total time waster?
Clay Shirky, lecturer at NYU, columnist and author of “Here Comes Everybody”, appeared at the RSA last week to promote his new book “Cognitive Surplus”. Like many new media commentators, the focus of his talk was the internet as the beginning of a major cultural shift of great advantage to mankind. I was one of the ones lucky enough to secure tickets to the event and so here is my summary and some thoughts packed into a blog post.
Firstly a brief explanation of the term: cognitive surplus refers to the cumulative attention/talent that is being pooled into collaborative projects enabled by new technology and the web. Not that interesting a concept in itself but is the momentum behind the shift away from pure consumption to production and sharing; a small shift that is having some quite dramatic effects. Where these effects are manifested in a negative way (Shirky gives the example of lol cats), there is a tendency to blame the tools. However, the cause of these effects lies in ancient motivations that are simply being channelled in new ways. This all seems a bit of a given to me but then I understand that this is still not something that is accepted by many of our distinguished tabloid journalists and other “guns kill people” type
The most interesting part of his thinking however was the idea that levels are participation are on a scale and that even the most stupid creative act is still, ultimately, a creative act. The big divide he says, is between participation and non-participation and I guess this is where new media makes a complete departure from the old.
Within participation, he draws a distinction between communal, public and civic value. Communal being entirely for personal amusement and gain (such as lol cats); public value being in a service such as Wikipedia that sees a small percentage of contributors but many users. Civic value on the other hand is the rather utopian idea of everyone contributing equally for a higher purpose of which he cites the example of PatientsLikeMe; a site where people with diseases and other long term health conditions can share information about their conditions, the drugs they are on and the effects that they experience in order to capture cumulative data and share this data with other patients/healthcare professionals
This idea raises a lot of interesting debates - how do we encourage more people to participate in civic activity? When they do, are they really doing it for the greater good or for personal gain? How do we know that this technology will be used for good and not evil? Shirky is very optimistic, he thinks that we are just at the beginning of things and that it will take a long time before we will see the real benefits to society but ultimately, while the negative effects are inevitable, he believes that bad will outweigh good. He also thinks that there is lots that we can do to break tasks down into achievable chunks and leverage the more involved in order to remove barriers to involvement for others.
But we are in a commercial line of work so what does all this mean to brands? Well, I think that successful civic projects, just like successful brands have a powerful idea at their heart that people just want to be a part of. Brands seeking to leverage new technology to the dramatic effects that Shirky describes can do lots to build a framework for participation and incentivise people to join in. What they shouldn’t do is build these frameworks purely for the sake of taking advantage of new technology (which is often the case).There is a great opportunity for brands that want to further their existing missions by identifying a fundamental personal, political or social motivation and use this to create something of real relevance and value for people. In the time of information overload and greater consumer control plus involvement this is more important than ever.
A full audio version of the talk is up on the RSA and the animate will be up in the next couple of days.
Written By Jo Weston