THE COGNITIVE SURPLUS

Hugh McLeod makes an excellent point in his latest blog post. He has been on fire of late btw, i’m sure the imminent book launch has to be sharpening him up even more. You have to read it.
He references Clay Shirky’s excellent theory of The Cognitive Surplus. An idea that excited me greatly when i first read about it on hugh’s blog last year i think.

The Cognitive Surplus theory maintains that the past sixty years we all spent gorging ourselves watching TV will be looked back on as anomalous. In the same way that the gin drinking epidemic of pre-Industrial England was. He singles out Wikipedia as a product of this surplus of attention and energy. A surplus that was masked by TV turning the masses into glazed over couch potatoes. Which makes a lot of sense. basically it means that now people aren’t passively glued to the telly anymore 24/7, and they’re all “actively” online instead, where does all this energy go and what can it do?

I shudder when i think back at how much telly i watched growing up. I once, in all seriousness, decided to not study for my yearly college exams and instead watch every single moment of the world snooker championships whose timing clashed with my exams. i decided that watching something on TV was more important than what was arguably the most important event of my life so far. The world snooker championship itself lasted almost a month. And every stroke of the cue was televised live. And I watched every single one! sheer and utter insanity looking back on it. I thought david vine was a member of my family.

Now that TVs chokehold on the attention of the masses has been loosened, all this attention and energy is available to be potentially harnessed by enterprises like Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see how it is used. it is tempting to imagine it will be all used positively and for the greater good, like wikipedia. but you know it will also be used for baser and evil intents too. humanity, you can’t beat it!

the good news was that i happened to have picked the most exciting world snooker championship ever to watch. this was how it all ended. 32 players whittled down to just 2 over three weeks. The final was played over two full days. It was all decided on the very last possible ball at two in the morning. truly one of the great moments in sport. and nobody in advertising ever gave a rat’s ass how i did in my college exams anyway. funny how things worked out.