Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky (James’s book 36, 2010)

Clay Shirky likes to pose for photographs in the stereotypical pose of the 'thinker', which has always made me rather suspicious. He's a little too much in love with his reputation, I think. As well as being a widely read author, both on- and offline, he's also a polished presenter. He's fond of pausing regularly and often, as if in profound contemplation, when in fact what he's doing is performing well rehearsed speeches. It's an effective conceit for the first time auditor, but on prolonged exposure it's annoyingly repetitive and ultimately feels slightly disingenuous.

Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky
Allen Lane 2010, Hardcover, 256 pages, £20.00

One thing that Shirky does extremely well is to tell a story. His stock in trade is to find some aspect of online behaviour, show how it is something that will disrupt or supplant traditional behaviour, and then find a compelling analogy through which to explain the behaviour change to the general reader.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this technique, except that it has strong tendencies towards oversimplification and triteness. Sadly, these two problems are shot through the fabric of his latest book. Shirky's favourite analogy is the invention of the printing press and the way that scribes were immediately obsoleted by it. A close second is the industrial revolution, but there are many others – for example, he opens here with a tale about gin addiction in 18th century London.

But this addiction to trite analogy and simplistic storytelling is not the biggest flaw of this flimsy book. Rather, it is the very foundation that it is built on: the idea that we have an enormous spare shared thought capacity which we are wasting by staring at the television. Cue an avalanche of statistics about the amount of TV viewing, and the amount of good that could be accomplished were that time to spent on things that Shirky has decided are beneficial to humanity. He admits that he doesn't watch TV, and this puts him at a distinct disadvantage with regard to understanding why so many people do, I suspect.

The fact is that people love television. It's true that the act of watching TV is not intrinsically good for humanity, and it's also true that there's an awful lot of shit programming, but that doesn't mean that TV is incapable of providing challenging, improving or educational experiences. More importantly, many people do not in fact have a surplus of brainpower that they would have the energy to use in their spare time. Most people I know work hard in challenging jobs (either physically, mental, or both), and the result is that they do not have mental capacity left over to do good online.

Regardless of whether many people could engage in Shirky-approved worthiness, the fact is that they do not want to. If they did, the technology barriers are so low that they would be doing so. I suspect that the truth is that all of the people who want to do Shirky-approved things are already doing them.

Shirky is frequently very interesting, and there are few writers as capable as he is of providing a slick synthesis of relatively recent online developments, but his central thesis here betrays a complete misunderstanding of the way that ordinary people live and relax. While his explanation of how some behaviour is being enabled by new online technologies is useful, his estimate of their likely impact seems to me to be grossly exaggerated, and his comparisons with genuinely revolutionary historical forces are overblown. The Internet has changed a great deal of things, but I can't see it changing people's basic natures in the way Shirky seems to think is possible.

Related posts:

1. The Ninth by Harvey Sachs (James's book 11, 2010)
2. Codename: Renegade by Richard Wolffe (James's book 8, 2010)
3. Carry On, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse (Shane's book 31, 2009)