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May 14, 2008

Cognitive recycling

From Clay Shirky: As we move online, we're recycling cognitive energy formerly invested in passive consumption of television, and applying it to active effort online.

This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

Update and oops: this was originally published before I completed the thought. From my comment below: "Clay's made a good point about repurposing cognitive cycles, but I wanted to acknowledge a challenge here for us to optimize the effectiveness of our recycled energies. How do we evolve distributed projects that, while in effect leaderless, are focused and effective? (I'm also going to add this question to the post.)"

jon posted this at 9:30 PM
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