Break a Leg

So there's this dude at NYU named Clay Shirky, who's talking all about this idea he calls cognitive surplus. It involves us all being underachieving morons because we watch TV and play video games all the time. I'm totally on board with it.

You should read the whole article, it's pretty interesting; I mean not now, you're reading this, and it's guaranteed to be marginally interesting just by lightly brushing concepts with the original article. The basic concept is that we all have untapped cognitive capability (surplus, get it?)  that could be put to use collectively, sort of a human version of SETI@Home or something.

Shirky thinks we should be making 2,000 more Wikipedias every year while we watch TV or whatever, which I can't really make sense out of what we'd do with… well, with all 2000 of them. We just need one. I may need to go back and read the article.

The other point he makes is how he wasn't blogging back in the 60s when he was watching Gilligan's Island, then it's like he's crazy or something because he remembers that blogging didn't exist back then. He really needs an editor to go through and fix that stuff before it gets printed, unless it's sort of a stream-of-consciousness writing style that isn't quite hitting on all cylinders.

He has some valid points though, and some truly dangerous ideas. He mentions "It's better to do something than to do nothing," then says how doing lolcats is doing something! We don't need to encourage these people, lolcats are just done, I mean just... done. Doing It Wrong is where we really need to be pushing the kids these days, it's more intelligent and less annoying.

Here's where I think it really hit home for me though: he says in order to really make a difference, we don't even have to really change much of anything at all. How's that for an easy sell? If 100% of the population watched just 1% less TV (or smoked 1% less dope or whatever) and did something even remotely contributory to society (yes, even lolcats), then we would have enough surplus back in the system to produce 100 more Wikipedias. Again, not on board with that, but maybe we could all turn that energy towards something not 100% redundant?

Like this blog posting here: it probably ranks somewhere below lolcats in usefulness to your life right now, but I have kept the TV off while typing it, then posted it on the web for all the world to see. Fairly often recently Yuri drags me out of my house and makes me perform like a (poorly) trained monkey and then forces Dashiell and Justin to piece it all together into something consumable by the world at large. Even the occasional random Twitter update I do is somehow contributing to at least getting me used to having more cognitive surplus, and keeping my ass off the couch and my eyes off the TV.

Well, I write these columns sitting on the couch, but you know what I mean.

And then the video gets posted and the fans watch, and comment, and rate, and share, and favorite, and playlist, and the whole wheel keeps turning around. We’re not making Wikipedias yet, but we're at least acclimatizing ourselves to a new attention paradigm: one that involves not just media consumption, but media consumption followed by contribution and participation. Media regurgitation.

I think Shirky's right when he says that this is a shift "more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting." I don't think anyone could have predicted this Information Revolution when the internet first lit up. Even if we at Break A Leg aren't writing a new Wikipedia just yet, we have at least as much to be proud of as lolcats. We don't quite have a critical mass of people who agree with that though, so keep telling your friends to watch the show.