Clay Shirky on the weird things that happen when things suddenly become abundant

A few months Clay Shirky gave a terrific speech (scroll down past the introductions for the full transcript) that got the most attention for this important lesson from a little girl:

"I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for."

But if you read the whole thing, you'll find an equally important lesson about why it takes a generation or two to figure out how to properly use some resource that used to be scarce but is now abundant. In this case that resource is time, which we got more of in the prosperous decades after the Second World War. For the first few generations, we chose to fill that time with television. Only now are we learning to fill it more productively, and to greater satisfaction. To use Clay's term, it took fifty years for us to learn how to tap the cognitive surplus that came after the five-day work week.

"I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing—there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders—a lot of things we like—didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened—rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement."

This is the same phenomena that I described earlier, using a computer science analogy rather than an economic one, as the "awesome power of spare cycles."

Comments

[Dean]

Wow. I have noticed the buzz around for "Here Comes Everyone" but hadn't got the full Clay Shirky riff. That is really quantum leap stuff (not unlike "The Long Tail" first time. Thanks for sharing.

[julian.bond]

Now consider this from the perspective of the developing world and especially China/India. What happens when the majority of the population shifts from spending 24 hours a day just surviving to having spare cycles to do something else?

[Jorge Carvalho]

Hey Chris, great to see you writing again. I'm a fan of Clay, his book is really great. I particularly like his speech about Love & The Internet. http://tinyurl.com/553bav

[Carol]

I taught my 28 yr old and my 14 yr old how to use the phone to find info by insisting that when they wanted a new toy or video game or book that they call the store and get the info on it, price, availability, location of store, etc. They are quite capable on the phone, now. Then about a year ago my 9 yr old wanted a new Tamagotchi. She called me from her dad's. I said, "Call Walmart and find out if they have any and how much they are, then call Toys R Us and Target, then call me back." She calls me back a few minutes later and says, "I didn't know the phone number so I went online. They have them at Walmart for ?? (however much they were)" It's a whole new world for our little ones.

[Kaleberg]

If you look at the time usage studies, television watching simply replaced spending time with one's friends. (I can get you a reference on this if you like). This substitution may have been a result of suburbanization which made it harder to socialize. You'll notice that the return of socialization via the internet is happening during an era of renewed appreciation of urban life.

[michael]

Networked tools are allowing groups to form and collaborate without any of the traditional friction that comes from managing the efforts of multitudes.

Clay talks about what that means, and the consequences of that, here:

http://www.scribemedia.org/2008/08/30/clay-shirky-here-comes-everybody/

[Chris Flanagan]

In his book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky wrote: “when we change the way we communicate, we change society.”

I’ve just written a profile about John Abele, retired founder of Boston Scientific and leader of the Grunion expedition - a global pursuit to find Abele’s father’s World War II submarine, lost at sea in the summer of 1942.

www.businessinnovationfactory.com/weblog/archives/2008/09/serendipity_soc.html#more

Abele’s quest for the Grunion is about the power of social networking and, to use Shirky’s terminology, “organizing without organizations.” It’s about what happens when serendipity intersects with technology and human intent.

I think you’ll enjoy the story - it’s both inspiring and demonstrative of the power of collective capability.

[Kate]

I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Kate

http://educationonline-101.com

[Angela]

Clay always seems to amaze me. :)

[Account Deleted]

For those of you thinking that if they implement this it will eliminate some of the waiting and lines…
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[Account Deleted]

Well, nice article buddy… Someone will love to read this infor if I tell her about this. For those of you thinking that if they implement this it will eliminate some of the waiting and lines…
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[cable]

Wow, it was really a fantastic information on the weird things that happen when things suddenly become abundant.. Thank you so much for sharing such an interesting information with us..

[Account Deleted]

Hi. I agree in principal with your ideas at the same time I do believe if someone invents something before others.
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