Cognitive Surplus: eh what?

Clay Shirky, talking head on social technology, the internet and technology’s effect on human behaviour, has a new book out. You’ve probably heard the book’s title “Cognitive Surplus” bandied about already. I was a little hazy over what this actually meant, so I headed along to the RSA to hear his explanation. I think I’ve just about wrapped my head around it:

1. The cumulative free time and talents of people within the developed world have to spend on stuff they like doing. (Mostly watching terrible TV, he says)
2. The shift from the media producing stuff for us to consume passively, to us producing stuff on our own. For free. i.e. How the Internet Now Lets You Make a LOLcat Bible and Inflict It On the Rest of the World Without a Publishing House Getting in the Way.

So free time + consumers creating stuff out of love, for free = cognitive surplus. What Shirky primarily focused on was the result of this surplus, and how it may lead to profound cultural change. He broke down the value of these online creations into three categories:

1. Communal value – creating stuff like LOLCats
2. Public value – providing information or some other service, like Wikipedia
3. Civic value – a (social) project which aims to fundamentally change social attitudes. e.g. How PatientsLikeMe connects individual users with certain medical conditions on the basis of the data they upload. BUT, above and beyond this, the project founders believe, contrary to social norms, you should be encouraged to just…give away your medical data. Your diseases, your dosages, everything, for the purposes of research. Read below for their Openness policy.

It’s these projects with civic value which seem to excite Shirky the most – the idea that without any contractual obligations, people willingly devote their free time to uploading their dosages to PatientsLikeMe, with the wider cultural aim to change how medical data is used for research. I found this example problematic – take a UK example of a civic-value project, the Democracy Club. The Democracy Club encourages anyone to scan election leaflets given out by their local candidates – one point being to hold them to account when they might renege on their original election promises.  The wider cultural aim here being not transparency in medical data, but transparency in democracy. Shirky would equate these Democracy Club volunteers with those uploading medical data to PatientsLikeMe. But I would argue these civic-value projects are different.

Surely those uploading data to projects like PatientsLikeMe are doing so for ultimately selfish purposes; to track their own medical data and to find out more about their own conditions. Read the language of the website; it’s all about how PatientsLikeMe can benefit you. I don’t think the majority of those users are uploading data with the purpose of improving medical transparency. By contrast, I do think Democracy Club volunteers are very aware of the wider cultural ramifications of holding local candidates up to account – with flyers (usually binnable once the election’s over) actually scanned and publicly available, it’s much easier to pin down MP’s who quietly change their policies once they’re in power. And that’s a win for transparent democracy. But one project positions itself as beneficial to the user, whereas the other makes it clear this is to achieve that wider cultural benefit.

That’s a quibble around specific examples, but…I guess the implicit question is this: do you have to dupe people to harness their cognitive surplus? In order to truly effect a cultural sea-change via online projects of civic value, do you have to fool the wider, average consumer who watches too much Eastenders into taking part in these projects? To encourage users to spend time on a task, for free (the proverbial stick), do you have to lure them in with some promise of immediate gratification (the carrot)? And if so – is that a good, ethical thing to do to effect wider cultural change?