What is “cognitive surplus”?
In the previous part of this two-part book review, I summarized some of Clay Shirky’s ideas in his popular book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. As pointed out, Shirky makes several interesting observations about how new media, such as smart devices and social networking sites, give users the power to easily self-organize.
However, as relevant as a few of his observations are, his unyielding optimism that these digital technologies will mostly benefit society tends to be his blind spot.
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Likewise, one could argue that more self-expression on platforms like social media can give voice to unique points of view not typically heard in mainstream media. And yet, those platforms also give voice to online extremism and harmful misinformation.
Shirky, perhaps aware of these problems, nevertheless defends his technological optimism in his follow-up book Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. It’s to that book we now turn to in Part II of this book review.
Cognitive surplus: Free time as a resource to share
In Cognitive Surplus, Shirky doubles down on the idea that new media will benefit society overall. In particular, he argues that these technologies will benefit society by making it easy for its members to share the products of their free time with one another. Free time as a resource to share is what Shirky calls cognitive surplus.By this reasoning, smartphones and social media have created a culture of sharing, including:
- Personal sharing (such as sharing photos and videos)
- Communal sharing (such as sharing meet-up events)
- Public sharing (such as sharing open source software)
- Civic sharing (such as sharing online activist causes)
This culture of sharing is, on the whole, positive, Shirky believes, because “there’s great value in seeing that we are not alone” (Shirky, 2010, p 172). Of course, he makes a fair point, in that new kinds of experience and behavior are “enabled by technology but created by human beings” (p 101).
Nevertheless, his cognitive surplus argument strikes me as Pollyannaish. (And not just because he has little to say regarding concerns about personal privacy and data protection online.) For instance, Shirky also says, “Those bits of new behavior … are extensions of, rather than replacements for, much older patterns of our lives as social creatures” [emphasis added] (p 101).
Here’s where I think Shirky doesn’t accurately identify what abilities digital technologies like social media platforms are actually extending.
What abilities do social media platforms extend?
To illustrate, take connecting with people on Facebook. We call that ‘friending,’ but do these social media platforms actually extend our ability to form friendships? Not really, if we’re honest.
I recall when I joined Facebook (before deleting it a few years later). Initially, I ‘friended’ my close friends. Later, various acquaintances ‘friended’ me. In time, my Facebook feed became jam-packed with dozens and dozens of others I happened to know, but only superficially. Nevertheless, just because you have a thousand friends on Facebook doesn’t mean all of them are truly your friends.
That’s because the power of social media platforms has much more to do with creating networks rather than extending our ability to form genuine friendships. Hence, they’re called social networking sites, not friendship extending sites! Clearly, it’s a mistake to confuse these two very different activities. What we call ‘friending’ should really be called networking. And conflating the latter with the former doesn’t necessarily imply a robust (or healthy) social life.
On a side note, I can’t help but to recall the film The Social Network, which dramatized how Facebook’s founders ironically destroyed their own friendships and relationships in a bedlam of betrayals and legal settlements, just to create the largest social networking site to date.
Social media: Extending or replacing friendships?
Contrary to Shirky’s argument that social media help us see we’re not alone, social networking sites may, in fact, cause us to feel more lonely, particularly when they exorbitantly suck up our free time. Sure, it’s one thing to use social media platforms to keep in touch or make plans to hang out later. Still, it’s another thing when these platforms eat up a significant amount of our personal downtime … which, by the way, they are designed to do!
More often than not, social media users find themselves constantly checking for notifications, replying to messages, reading or leaving comments, searching and responding to ‘friend’ requests, and keeping up with likes, shares, news feeds, photos, videos, memes, online games, or whatnot. Obviously, all this busy activity can distract our attention from more meaningful quality time with close friends and loved ones.
Indeed, a number of psychologists have concluded that social media are, in many ways, replacing—not extending—existing friendships. For example, crunching data on teens born since 1995 (a cohort known as iGen or Gen Z), psychologist Jean Twenge observes, “on average, today’s teens are spending less time with each other in person and more time online.” It’s a collective trend consistent across multiple demographic variables, including socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and gender. As Twenge explains,
with the advent of social media and smartphones, teens’ social lives shifted decisively away from in-person interaction. They spend much less time with their friends in person than teens in previous decades did—about an hour a day less. The lives of teens—and the rest of us—may never be the same again as mobile Internet access puts down deeper and deeper roots in our lives (Twenge, 2017, 76).
New media’s Faustian bargain!
As educator Neil Postman often said, technology is always Faustian bargain: the good is never without the bad. Shirky is an author who tends to emphasize the good. To be sure, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach. However, if we want a more complete and accurate picture, it’s prudent to balance his perspective with others that don’t shy away from revealing the bad.
On this note, I’d highly recommend comparing technologists like Clay Shirky to psychologists like Sherry Turkle. For instance, Turkle specializes in the psychology of human-computer interaction. And her research is especially helpful in showing what kinds of human-computer interaction tend to be healthy or unhealthy. (For those interested, I recommend her book Alone Together: Why We expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.)
References
Shirky, Clay. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New York: The Penguin Group.
Twenge, Jean. (2017). iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. New York: Atria Books.
Beg to differ about this critique of “cognitive surplus”? Feel free to leave your thoughts in a comment below. For other book reviews or synopses, check out other Recommended Reading on this site.