Clay Shirky, socioeconomic pundit of the web world, recently posted a great piece on the marked one-way shift to participatory media (or rather, the growing expectation thereof).
Shirky examines what he terms “cognitive surplus,” chronicling America’s most popular modes of distraction across time: from gin to television to blogs and social networks.
Distraction is a funny word, though…. evoking positive thoughts of pleasure and leisure, yet clearly linked to darker shades of laziness and mania. That said, Shirky does a commendable job of keeping its syntax convincingly neutral. Distraction mechanisms, at the hands of media professionals in particular, are things to be studied, embraced, and actively shaped in close regard to the current cultural episteme. It is in this light that his closing anecdote becomes subtly powerful:
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. 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.
It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing-and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.
Technorati Tags: The Web Outside, Clay Shirky, participatory media, distractions, television, new media, cognitive surplus
