Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-09-06/Book review
Cognitive surplus, by Clay Shirky
Wikipedia is a prime example of such a collaboration, and Shirky was one of its earliest observers: In his April 2003 talk "A group is its own worst enemy", where he warned of the fundamental group dynamics that tend to threaten online communities, he singled out Wikipedia as a group that had avoided such threats. In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, Wikipedia figures as a key example. (Shirky has been on the Wikimedia Foundation's Advisory Board since 2007 and was consulted for the WMF's Strategic Planning project.) In Cognitive surplus, Wikipedia is less prominent, but the book is filled with insights, anecdotes and research results that make it an excellent read for Wikimedians who want to reflect on the successes and challenges of the Foundation's projects.
Wasting or using free time
Cognitive surplus grew out of an April 2008 talk (the transcript provocatively titled "Gin, television, and social surplus"). Shirky is following a decades-old tradition of criticizing TV as a passive medium, poignantly expressed in his exchange with a TV producer to whom he had described the intense collaboration of Wikipedians:
| “ | she sighed and said, "Where do people find the time?" Hearing this, I snapped and said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from." She knew, because she worked in the industry that had been burning off the lion's share of our free time for the last fifty years. | ” |
For Shirky, even playing (collaborative) computer games such as
The second chapter examines the new means by which people can aggregate cognitive surplus. The basic theme – that the Internet has radically reduced the cost for communicating, and particularly for publishing – has been elaborated many times; but Shirky still manages to present it in a fresh, clear narrative, by focusing on what he calls "Gutenberg economics", where the act of publication carries a high financial risk and the decision on what to publish is therefore crucial. After remaining in force for the past five centuries, this economic principle is no longer valid. Just as Gutenberg's invention of movable type had precipitated a sharp drop in the costs of making a book, and consequently a drop in the average quality of books ("before Gutenberg, the average book was a masterpiece"), the Internet caused a drop in the average quality of published content, but compensates for this with room for experimentation and diversity, such that "the best work becomes better than what went before".
Motivating and cultivating collaboration
Why exactly do people share and collaborate? Shirky's discussion of several research results from psychology and behavioral economics might be of great interest to Wikimedians.
| “ | Nearly all of them are gone now and left a lot of [low quality] articles ... they don’t care because they were there for laptops and other prizes (no need to be rude, but it hurts me pretty bad).[1] | ” |
According to Deci, there are two kinds of "personal" intrinsic motivation: a desire to be autonomous (to be in control of one's actions) and to be competent ("to be good at what we do"). These are complemented and reinforced by two kinds of "social" intrinsic motivations (according to
Shirky addresses the "digital sharecropping" criticism formulated by Nicholas Carr, who argues that just as land owners used to exploit farm workers without pay, allowing them only a share of the crops they had grown themselves, today's owners of online platforms reap the value that the participants of online communities generate without pay. Shirky mostly dismisses these complaints, which "arise partly from professional jealousy", by arguing they are a misapplication of Gutenberg economics: the participants are not workers driven by financial incentives (external motivations), but contributors motivated by a desire to share. However, Shirky notes the AOL Community Leader Program, where a "change from a community-driven site to an advertising-driven site" robbed volunteer moderators of such motivations (and prompted a class action lawsuit that concluded this May, after 11 years), as a case where the "digital sharecropping" term is justified. Historians of Wikipedia will recall how concerns over possible advertising on Wikipedia prompted the Spanish fork in 2002.
Chapter four, titled "Opportunity", describes the ways in which such motivations, enabled by the new collaboration tools, lead to successful "social production" (the example that Shirky devotes most room to is the Apache HTTP Server project). One interesting notion here is that of "combinability", further explored in the fifth chapter, which describes the kind of "culture" that according to Shirky must be fostered to enable society to benefit from its cognitive surplus. As a lucid comparison, he describes the Invisible College in 17th century England, a collaboration of scholars which played an important role in the scientific revolution, later morphing into the Royal Society. Shirky's main point here is that Gutenberg had provided the technical means for this kind of collaboration long before, but it was brought about only by a change in culture – from that of the alchemists, whose secretive attitude made them repeat each others' errors, to the open scientific communication we know today, that enables scholars to combine their knowledge better. Shirky cites economist Dominique Foray who posits four conditions that must be met for a community to combine knowledge effectively, regarding:
- The size of the community
- The cost of sharing the knowledge
- The clarity of the shared information
- The cultural norms of the recipients
It is clear that the Internet helps to reduce the cost of sharing and to enlarge the number of possible participants. "Clarity" might refer to forms like recipes or standard description formats. Here again, Shirky argues that "culture", the fourth condition, is the most crucial one, relating to "shared assumptions about how [the group] should go about its work, and about its members' relations". The term community of practice has been coined for groups that have developed a certain form of such a culture. Shirky does not mention Wikipedia in this respect (citing free software projects instead), but it is not hard to see that it might be worthwhile to apply Foray's criteria and the notion of a "community of practice" to Wikipedia – British historian Dan O'Sullivan has written an entire book called "Wikipedia: a new community of practice?" (see Signpost review).
In the sixth chapter, Shirky comes back to the difference between projects like Wikipedia and platforms like I Can Has Cheezburger?, or between collaborations that provide civic value for society and those that only reward their members. He revisits a main topic from his 2003 "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" talk: The results of group dynamics researcher W. Bion, who identified three ways in which the emotional needs of participants often derail collaborating groups from pursuing their shared goal (see Wilfred_Bion#Basic_assumptions): The group can degenerate into blind veneration of an idol (Tolkien in a Lord of the Rings newsgroup), into quasi-paranoid defense against real or perceived outside threats (Microsoft among Linux fans in the 1990s), or into "pairing off" when the members are mostly concerned with forming romantic couples "or discussing those who form them". Groups have to respect the emotional needs of their members (Shirky notes that even an extremely hierarchical group such as the military "is deeply concerned about the soldier's morale"), but if they aim at more and provide civic value, they need to develop some sort of governance. Again, the Wikipedian reader might reflect how Bion's insights relate to Wikipedia policies.
In the final chapter, Shirky ventures to give some more direct advice on how to start successful social media platforms. However, he cautions that it is not possible to formulate an overall strategy for harnessing cognitive surplus – experimentation is still essential to find "the most profound uses of social media".
Assessing Shirky's ideas
The book's basic themes have some inevitable overlap with those of "Here Comes Everybody". However, by introducing the notion of cognitive surplus, Shirky manages to provide a fresh perspective.
Shirky's frequent use of examples and anecdotes has often been criticized (for example by
Discuss this story
Wow, great effort in analysing and summarizing the book! — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 07:29, 7 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Ditto, thank you for the informative review! -Reagle (talk) 13:49, 7 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]