Thanks to Russell Arben Fox, I caught this speech by Clay Shirky on how the Internet is reshaping our lives. (Check out the comments at his blog, too.) He speculates we haven’t yet completed adjusted to the world in the Internet age, just as there was a lag time before people learned how to deal with the changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Russell summarizes his talk,
I’m dubious about much of the history he invokes, and his math to
calculate just "where do people find the time?" sounds a little
crackpot to me…and yet the whole thing, his imagined evolution of us
from passive tv-watchers to interactive Wikipedia-page-writers,
was brilliantly persuasive. In 15 minutes, he travels from the
wrenching changes of the industrial revolution (and its essential
technology, gin), to the unexpected wealth of the post-WWII world (and
its essential technology, the television sitcom), to the "cognitive
surplus," to Pluto, and beyond. Watch the whole thing to the end, to
make sure you get the somewhat scary (but oh so truthful) story of the
4-year-old and the dvd player.
I’m a little less of a Luddite than Russell, so I’m more easily persuaded by Shirky than he is.
My stories about my kids and technology:
Story One: What’s the first letter of the alphabet that my kids learned? W. Because everything in their world begins with www.
Story Two: Jonah’s first worlds after the regular "mom" and "dad" were the names of the Thomas trains that he learned from playing the Thomas the Tank Engine games online.
Story Three: Before Ian could talk, he could turn on the computer, find a game under the favorites menu, and then play the game.
Story Four: When Ian is upset about something, he’ll often say that he wants "to return to the main menu."
All things considered, I would rather blog, than watch Giligan’s Island.
Apt. 11d 
My son doesn’t use the phone. He arranges basketball games and bike rides via IM or online games.
The girl is less techie–mostly because her friends aren’t, but she’s more interested in blogging than my son is. I think once she’s a bit older, she’ll be more into it.
And I’m with you, I’d much rather blog than watch Gilligan’s Island. And I loved the comment about WoW. As somewhat of a WoW addict, I totally know where he’s coming from. I bet we both read more books that that tv producer.
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I remember finding my daughter Katie doing some artwork when she was 4. She had written a little children’s book about herself. And on the last page she wrote, “go to http://www.katie.com for more details”. This daughter is now 7 and is regularly asking to put up her own web site. I have put her off thus far.
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Story: when my daughter came along, we were pretty poor and my husband was trying to eke out a living, as they say in the fairy tales, as a poor Graphic Designer using a 486 (remember them?!)
We didn’t have any games on it at all, but the drive to use the keyboard is so strong in children. By the time daughter was four, she was expert in Microsoft Word, Paint, Corel Draw and Photoshop.
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Story: when my daughter came along, we were pretty poor and my husband was trying to eke out a living, as they say in the fairy tales, as a poor Graphic Designer using a 486 (remember them?!)
We didn’t have any games on it at all, but the drive to use the keyboard is so strong in children. By the time daughter was four, she was expert in Microsoft Word, Paint, Corel Draw and Photoshop.
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That was awesome – thanks for sharing it with us! I think he’s so right. Even when I do watch TV these days, I go right over to televisionwithoutpity.com to read what other people thought of the episode and share my thoughts. It’s not just consumption anymore.
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It was never just consumption–people talked about it with their families and over the water cooler the next day. It was social glue, it was spending time together doing something fun, it was sharing in-jokes.
And there have always been people who created. People who knit or sewed or did other hand crafts, people who wrote poetry, people who gardened.
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Oooh, good points, Kai.
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And there is plenty of the mental equivalent of Gilligan’s Island on the Internet. There’s plenty of passive consumption of pretty stupid stuff. And even when there’s a chatroom or some interactive feature, it’s bottom dwelling chatter. Only a small percent of the Internet users are having these sorts of chats in comment sections of blogs or contributing to a wikipedia entry on Pluto.
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To Kai Jones point, which is excellent, I will add this: Shirky’s argument is supported by a false equation of (a) the experience of watching, with (b) the experience of watching Gilligan’s Island, as well as a false equation of (a) doing something, with (b) doing something with digital media. OF COURSE it’s better to blog than to watch Gilligan’s Island. But it is better to make a lolcat than to watch a Shakespeare play? From the criteria Shirky applies, one would have to say yes.
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He said something like, “any person, using very modest tools, has a reasonable chance of capturing this cognitive surplus, this desire to participate, etc.”
Which really is just a bunch of BS. The lecture was a bunch of gee-whiz observations – the kind stoned roommates have in college.
He was talking about the person who created some wiki application. How representative of an average person is a creator of a wiki application? One in 10,000 might have an idea interesting enough to try out, one in 5,000 might be able to program it, etc.
There always has been, and always will be a tiny fraction of people who create and innovate. Or alternately, most of us probably have one or two good ideas in our lifetimes…
Yeah, blogs are innovative, and the internet of course…. I can comment on an article for the Washington Post, which makes me feel like I’m participating. But once the readers and commenters start to number in the thousands, how substantive is your contribution? So, I had an illusion of participation because I was one of the early readers and commenters of the online format. If a site is large enough to actually “capture the cognitive surplus” in a significant way, individual contributions are negligible. By necessity, and by definition, the numbers don’t work out.
People in these small elite groups, and people who were early movers, have an oversized opinion of themselves, and apparently also make the mistake of thinking the circles they travel in are representative.
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By create and innovate, he’s not just talking about the person who creates a wiki application. He’s talking about the people who put information together using Web 2.0 technology.
People with very little programming skill are compiling data and analyzing data and revisioning data in multiple ways. People are writing Wikipedia entries. People are archiving old video via You Tube. People are creating map mashups to guide people to public bathrooms in various cities. That’s the kind of thing Shirky is talking about.
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As someone very integrated with modern technology, I often wonder how my kids will interact with it. I LOVED your story about your child “returning to the main menu.”
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