I AM BRIMMING WITH COGNITIVE SURPLUS

[defrog]

[At least some of you have probably already seen this, but it’s somewhat relevant to the recent Australian music industry propaganda wars I’ve been posting.]

ITEM [via Warren Ellis]: Clay Shirky recently delivered a brilliant speech about “cognitive surplus” that resulted from post-WW2 society suddenly having more leisure time than it knew what to do with, and dealing with it by watching sitcoms. Now we have Web 2.0, which lets people channel that cognitive surplus into Wikipedia, World Of Warcraft, YouTubes, LOLcats or blogs like this one.

Read it here. Or watch it now.

If you don’t have time (because Desperate Housewives is coming on in a few minutes or something), here’s the important takeaways:

Media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share ... And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer...

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. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

This is what the RIAA, the MPAA and the TV industry are afraid of, basically. They like it when we consume their content. They don’t like us making our own to compete with them, and they don’t like us sharing what content of theirs we do consume. But instead of giving customers what they want, they tried to make them like what they were being given. And it’s not working like it used to.

This, incidentally, makes me what’s going to happen with books – where will they fit in the cognitive surplus? After all, if yr reading a book, yr technically sitting around being unproductive – though maybe you can argue reading is a more cognitive activity than watching BSG.

And how about the interactive element? If you don’t count those silly D&D “choose yr own ending” books, the experience of reading a book is still an analog, self-contained, top-down experience – at least in print. Maybe e-books will change that, too. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read something in a book and wished I had a way to copy and paste that passage to share with the rest of you.

But then that’s what Google Books is for – and the book industry freaked out over that, too.

My brain hurts,

This is dF

Comments

[loissanborn.livejournal.com]

i think he hit the nail on the head. we as consumers have evolved.
the formula used to be
X + Y = Interested Consumers
and now it's more like
X + Y + Interested Consumers = Interested Consumers

and i think that the media has been using the first formula for so long, and building their entire industry around that principle, now they have no idea what to do to change it.

there's a lot of things that will change, i.e. radio, books, tv, movies, even government maybe, and i am very excited to see where we will go from here.
thank you for posting the video. i thought it was very thought provoking.