Social web & social media, consultancy, training and advice from a flâneur of the internets. Blogger, writer, broadcaster and runner of Birmingham: It's Not Shit. I also do the odd bit of art.
July 7th, 2010

Clay Shirky and the Cognitive Surplus

George Orwell said, in an essay of fulsome praise of the man and his work, that Charles Dickens “was not a revolutionary writer”. He didn’t mean that Dickens wasn’t capable of or responsible for revolutions in prose, but that despite the image as a champion of the downtrodden he didn’t wish for systemic revolution — everything would be better, Dickens thought, if people were nicer.

That almost sums up what I think of the work of Clay Shirky, in his first book Here Comes Everybody and now in the new Cognitive Surplus he gives example after example of positive ways that the social web has altered the way people behave and organise, but while talking about revolution he is offering not too much more than the idea that the rules can be as simple as “be nice”. Like the first book it’s a great read, it’s enthusing and Shirky explains the ‘why’ better than almost anyone else — he even, surprisingly to me as it’s the first time I’ve read or heard him touch upon it,  has a belated go at the ‘how’.

The cognitive surplus of the title is the comeback to the question “how do people find the time?” often asked about people who are active on the social web — Shirky’s (rather glib, he admits himself) answer is “they stopped watching television”.  You can get the gist of this from some of his recent talks like this one in Bristol (thanks Pete), but to sum up and very much paraphrase: ‘economic circumstances since the 1940s have given people more free time and they now have tools to use that time on a wider collaborative scale’.

Where I was uncomfortable with Here Come Everybody where the examples where it seemed as if an educated, connected, class could use these tools to produce pressure even if that was exerted on a lower class. I’m unsure as to whether Shirky doesn’t see these issues, doesn’t see them as a problem, or, is merely pointing out facts without editorialising. It may be due to my own thoughts around class and digital inclusion, or it may be due to the American perspective on class issues being different. Where Cognitive Surplus falls down for me is not just this, although problems do seem to be on the radar,  but the way civic actions formed from this surplus are strictly divided from the merely communal.

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February 12th, 2009

Here Comes Everybody Else

I spent a great high-minded couple of hours yesterday at BCU and the Creative Industries Book Club discussing Clay Shirky’s  Here Comes Everybody — a book about how the internet (and the social internet especially) is transforming the business of “organising”.

Clay Shirky's masterpiece: Here Comes Everybody - Boing Boing
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch! (this isn’t the real cover – but I like it more)

I’d read the book just after the hardback edition came out, which not only meant that I’d missed the Epilogue (where Shirky finally mentions Twitter) but that I’d had to quickly re-read it when Jon Hickman invited me to the club. In fact I’d really whipped through it as I live tweeted a review.

The reason I’d been invited, apart from because they’re all nice people, was that the Big City Talk site I’ve recently developed and “organised” is a very neat case study of the type that Shirky is talking about throughout his book — and rather more close to home (certainly something that Dave Harte was kind enough to say on his blog). I’m waiting for the dust to settle a little before fully documenting the Big City Plan / Talk project, but I’m pleased to say that it’s gone well and has (rather thrillingly) been mentioned in the Cabinet Office’s Power of Information report.

After my brief introduction the assembled minds thoroughly dissected the book, and I think, found it to be a superb (and utopian) introduction to the power of the social web — but lacking in grit or any real depth. Andrew Dubber made a superb point about the idea of how “cheap” this organisation online is — that the marginal cost is cheap, but that you have already to have the tools (the computers/or access) and the skills. This is something I’m thinking about more and more with my work with We Share Stuff around “digital inclusion” — John Kirby’s blog post on the book club has a good account of this.

What Shirky is doing from my perspective is detailing ways in which existing organisational structures fail, and where the looser, more ad-hoc ones now enabled by technology do things more easily (or make possible things that weren’t possible before). He doesn’t, however, offer any solutions — he’s not trying to, for at this stage it’s not possible to offer even a buffet-style array of potential solutions. Each organisation’s situation is — if not unique — something that can only be tackled by culture change within the organisation. Outside people like myself can advise, help and train, but in the end the social tools need to be used by the people closest to the business.

If you haven’t really got a handle on “where all this stuff is going” then Here Comes Everybody is certainly a good place to start, hopefully it’s scary and enthusing in equal measures. And I can always point to examples that are much more “real”.














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