Cognitive Surplus

I have been hesitant to enter the fray on Clay Shirky's new book. Part of the reason for this is because I feel most of the important points have been hit, for instance that the internet has enabled higher levels of cognitive achievement. Or that if we'd all turn off our TV's and reinvest that time in learning and sharing information the world would be a better place. Or that if we all turned off our TV's and reinvest that time in learning and sharing information with the world we'd all be really bored.

Shirky points out that the 1oo million hours spent writing all of Wikipedia is less than one thousandth the amount of time Americans spend in front of the TV every year. If we spent that time on cognitively positive activities, he thinks the world would rapidly evolve into a better place. TAE thinks that if you subtracted the amount of time spent on wikipedia articles about TV shows and movies, the ratio would become 5 to 10 times higher.

But here's where TAE waxes liberal: rather than imagining a world where we don't waste our cognitive resources in front of the boob tube, I imagine a world where the huge, vast, massive, appalling number of people living in squalor and famine are free to donate to the cognitive surplus!
Why should we try to convince people to watch TV less and learn more in hopes of increasing the cognitive surplus of developed nations, when increasing the quality of life in the developing world would add entire new minds to the cognitive bank account.

The reason I suggest this as an alternative is because people need their entertainment outlets. The average person is scared of their own thoughts, or has been taught to fear them, or has learned to hate them. The average person needs TV so they can focus on lives that aren't their own, that they know are fictional. People escaped reality via various means all throughout human history, either watching gladiators, or taking opiates, or drinking alcohol, or staging revolutions.
The fact is, America was humming along at an amazingly productive rate, with an amazing plethora of innovations and a sick-fast rise in economic output, all while Shirky's hated sitcoms sprayed jokes and commercials in our faces. And if Shirky can claim that the current world population, with their TVs and their internet, has watched X hours of TV and spent Y hours building Wikipedia, could I not argue that it would be better for all if instead of decreasing X in order to increase Y, instead we should increase both through the addition of more brains?

Certainly, we all could do with a little less TV time, for many reasons, our fattening hindquarters not being the least of these. But telling people to stop watching TV and spend more time contributing to a global cognitive resource is essentially the same as telling us to stop sleeping so much; spend more waking hours contributing to a global cognitive resource. Time spent mentally vegging, like time spent dreaming, is physically and mentally essential for your health.


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