Review by Choice Review
Sometimes psychology, technology, and media studies meet, and the result is a clever riff on the state of things. Shirky's riff is this compact book, which has a decidedly civic-minded outlook. Shirky (interactive telecommunications, NYU) posits that starting in the postwar boom of the late 1940s, educated and suburbanized Americans unknowingly developed ample disposable time, energy, and brainpower. Until recently, this individual and collective "cognitive surplus"--the Shirkyan term for this intellectual surfeit--was usually spent passively watching television, the medium formerly known as dominant. Enter the Internet, which has changed the game entirely. Now people can care, share, and pool their virtual talents while surfing to create connections and new resources that often cost little or nothing (think Wikipedia, Apache). Although the jury is still out, the evidence for this observation is growing. People can and will do good for no remuneration, generating creative solutions to societal ills in the process. Sometimes the book has the breezy, jiggy style of a blog; other times it is pedantic and repetitive--but so, dear readers, is the Internet. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. D. S. Dunn Moravian College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IT'S become gauche, lately, to criticize television. In the age of "The Sopranos," "The Wire," "Lost" and "Mad Men," TV has achieved a measure of cultural respectability that would flummox longtime naysayers. The guy who constantly mentions he doesn't own a television is an Onion joke. If you really believe that TV is a wasteland, you're either a crank, a pedant or unfortunate enough to have missed that one episode of "Battlestar Galactica" in which we find out about the Cylons. Or you're Clay Shirky, a celebrated scholar of Internet culture who teaches at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Shirky isn't concerned with what's on TV. What galls him is how much we watch, regardless of what's on. Television, he writes in "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age," has "absorbed the lion's share of the free time available to citizens of the developed world." Just in the United States, he maintains, we collectively watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year. For a vast majority of us, watching TV is essentially a part-time job. What would the world be like if many of us quit our TV-watching gigs? Critics of television have long lamented its opportunity costs, but Shirky's inquiry into what we might join together to do instead if we weren't watching TV isn't as fantastical as previous efforts. That's because for the first time since the advent of television, something strange is happening - we're turning it off. Young people are increasingly substituting computers, mobile phones and other Internet-enabled devices for TV. And when they do watch the tube, they're doing it socially, collaborating to produce terabytes of online material that deepens their appreciation for whatever's on. (For proof that the most ardent fans of "Lost" spend more time discussing the show online than watching it on TV, look up the Web site Lostpedia. Careful, there are spoilers.) The time we might free up by ditching TV is Shirky's "cognitive surplus" - an ocean of hours that society could contribute to endeavors far more useful and fun than television. With the help of a researcher at I.B.M., Shirky calculated the total amount of time that people have spent creating one such project, Wikipedia. The collectively edited online encyclopedia is the product of about 100 million hours of human thought, Shirky found. In other words, in the time we spend watching TV, we could create 2,000 Wikipedia-size projects - and that's just in America, and in just one year. If it seems far-fetched to imagine the industrial world's TV-watching hordes fleeing the couch to build projects as demanding as Wikipedia, Shirky has some news for you - they already are. "Cognitive Surplus" teems with examples of collaborative action. Fans of the singer Josh Groban, for instance, came together online to form a remarkably successful charity. Many of the world's Web sites run on Apache, open-source server software created by programmers across the globe. And by loosely organizing online, the teenage girl fans of a South Korean boy band nearly brought down their government by staging weeks of protest over the importation of American beef. Much of "Cognitive Surplus" is a meditation on the mechanics of these groups - how and why they form and stay together - but Shirky's analysis is too often abstruse and scattershot. He lapses into academic jargon (brush up on your "intrinsic" and "extrinsic") and muddies his points with needless digressions on the follies of institutions still stuck in the pre-digital world, which feels like shooting fish in a barrel. THE bigger problem is that, while making a convincing case for the social revolution that could come from our liberation from TV, Shirky seems to be telling just half the story. Nearly every one of his examples of online collectivism is positive; everyone here seems to be using the Internet to do such good things. Yet it seems obvious that not everything - and perhaps not even most things - that we produce together online will be as heartwarming as a charity or as valuable as Wikipedia. Other examples of Internet-abetted collaborative endeavors include the "birthers," Chinese hacker collectives and the worldwide jihadi movement. In this way a "cognitive surplus" is much like a budgetary surplus - having one doesn't necessarily mean we'll spend it well. You could give up your time at the TV to do good things or bad; most likely you'll do both. In the time spent watching TV each year, Americans could create 2,000 Wikipedias. Farhad Manjoo, a technology columnist at Slate, is the author of "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 15, 2010]
Review by Library Journal Review
Shirky (interactive telecommunications, NYU; Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations) answers the question: Is society going to hell in a handbasket or entering a period of higher consciousness? Many technology pundits are weighing in on the meaning of the changes in society brought about by social networking. Some-Jared Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget and Andrew Keen in Cult of the Amateur-are concerned, while Shirky and others see the dawn of a better era. Shirky argues that since the postwar boom we've had a "cognitive surplus" of free time, intellect, talent, and goodwill but few opportunities and means to exploit it. Today's social and technological environment is enabling us to extend existing civic behaviors beyond anything we could have imagined and enables us to behave in new, positive ways. But the results have been disorienting to many leaders and elders, and Shirky never delves into the dark side in which the cognitive surplus would be used to undermine civil society. VERDICT This thought-provoking, sunny, optimistic read will appeal to those interested in technology's social impact.-James A. Buczynski, Seneca Coll. of Applied Arts & Tech, Toronto (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Choice Review
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Library Journal Review
