Funnelling Cognitive Surplus With and Without Your Permission

A popular post at the moment is Clay Shirky's written version of his talk at the Web2.0 conference titled: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. The thesis of the post is along the lines of television as a system for addressing the cognitive surplus from average peoples scheduled spare time. Before TV, during the industrial revolution it was gin (drink your self stupid), and Shirky relates such wasted human cycles to the thought-effort required to create a Wikipedia sized project. This point is used to push the notion that there is currently a shift in media from passive consumers (TV and newspapers) to active consumers, producers. and sharers.

These notions hook in to the classical architecture of participation (O'Reilly 2003, 2004, discussion 2004) where systems are created to allow users to be produces and consumers and more importantly define what and how they produce and consume within the systems loosely defined constraints. Shirky highlights that there is a growing expectation for media to be deployed into this model, and promotes the idealised notion of donating a few percent of annual human cycles online.

Does tagging a popular blog post in del.icio.us have a higher or lower cognitive load than discussing an episode of Lost at work? Are the aggregate effects of those tags more valuable to society than the aggregated impact of such conversations? Different domains, so naturally the methods (computational, social) vary for aggregation and information extraction.

Something I have noticed personally (myself and friends) is that there are plenty more ways to soak up you cognitive surplus online, even in architectures of participation. So-called tracking the technology market itself and reading popular tech news and commentary are still reasonably passive activities. You may contribute clicks, comments, and maybe opinions (like this post), which I presume sometimes is better than watching a TV show and chatting about it with others. My point is that on the spectrum of contributions, these are really low, and even in aggregate are relatively low quality (feed into page rank or something similar). People that want to produce, will produce and some of those things will be as generally useful as contributions to Wikipedia articles. Those that want to passively consume (lurk) will continue to do so. The shift is that automated computation may allow organisations to exploit such passive gestures for their and maybe our (as users) utility.

This last point highlights that although TV may be dissipating cognitive or attention surplus, it may not be dissipating contribution surplus. Regarding this discussion of surplus, I would like to see something done with all the computational surplus. Here, right now, while you are reading this post, what is your CPU doing? 99% consumed with an idle process? Awesome.

Thoughts like that inspire me to bash out a distributed in-browser data processing system (firefox plug-in? AJAX?) that consumes these cycles toward helping the user. A massive probabilistic model of a users interests would be useful, even if it's crap most of the time or in most domains.

Regarding architectures of participation, a related notion at the time the term popularised was Dan Bricklin's napster inspired three models of contribution: Expert, Mechanical, and Volunteer, from his 2001 post The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor. This was rephrased by O'Reilly as Expert, Volunteer, and Shared (for example). Beyond public by default in the shared model, one may consider the broader notion of the exploitation of contributions through selfish user action (as was discussed in that post). Instead of direct public effects like public photo or link streams, the system solves hard problems, the products of which are publicly consumable (yes, the digitized books example again).

Such efficient and automated exploitation of passive and active contributions may herald a new age of participation (whether users choose to participate or not), although more importantly will likely demarcate the next generation of successful corporations like the factories and media conglomerates before them.