Clay Shirky, social media guru, talks to NPR about his concept of "cognitive surplus" and how it is changing the world. Shirky argues that we live in a world that is more conducive to fortuitous accidents because more of us are connected and can see what each of us is posting and are able to connect the dots for ourselves. We can see more of what people are putting out there and we are able to contribute more easily to the growing wealth of knowledge, perspectives, ideas and information that is now available.
In fact, that is how Shirky defines the term "cognitive surplus"; it is the ability of "more of us to see more of us, and more of us to be able to connect the dots for ourselves." Cognitive surplus is "the ability of the world's population to collaborate, contribute and volunteer on large -- sometimes global -- projects."
The focus of both Shirky's TED talk and his NPR interview is on non-monetary motivation behind human behavior, and he finds that non-monetary social motivation is often more powerful in modifying behavior than contractual overhead. Shirky says that people have a lot of free time and talent which they can commit to shared projects, and that this has always been the case. The thing that has changed in recent years, according to Shirky, is that people now have tools -- particularly in the form of mobile devices -- to move beyond being mere consumers to being creators and sharers of content. This, Shirky says, generates what he calls cognitive surplus.
In a society of cognitive surplus people increasingly devote time and energy to projects that they enjoy doing, even though these projects entail a lot of work, without monetary compensation. People are compensated, instead, by other things such as a sense of autonomy, a feeling of competence, a sense of group membership, a feeling of appreciation, and so on. It is not that people, who do things for free, are motivated by altruism and purity of heart, rather, their selfish motivation is different from that of a person who is motivated to invest in a project because they are paid to do it or their boss told them to.
So long as we ask the question, Shirky says, "Why are these people working for free?" we will never understand what is happening. The question we have to ask, he says, is "What are the non-financial motivations that draw these people out of themselves and to get into groups or to collaborate together?"
Shirky says that it takes a leap to move from being a non-creator to becoming a creator. The gap, he says, is not between someone who is prolific and someone who is not, but between someone who has created nothing and someone who has created something, even if what they have created is about the stupidest thing imaginable. Once one crosses that hurdle on the internet from creating nothing to creating something their whole relationship to the internet changes and becomes more and more profound with each new thing they create. They have shifted their relationship from being a consumer to being, even in the smallest way, a producer of internet content and a contributor to the digital consciousness of humankind.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, also discusses with NPR the non-monetary nature of motivation to produce content on the internet. Wales talks about how millions of people are motivated to spend hours of their time in collaboration on project. He uses Wikipedia as an example of this dedicated free labor. One may go on an editing binge for Wikipedia and, unlike the feeling after a binge of playing video games, one feels as though one's time has been well spent, The motivation for their investment of time and energy is non-monetary, and this would seem to fit Paul Mason's description of the nature of activity in a post-capitalist society.
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