Business, Society - Written Monday, September 14, 2009 by Denis Hancock - 6 Comments

Cognitive Surplus and Social Media

Last week I read Tom Davenport’s piece in HBR called “Are Social Media Contributing to the decline of civilization.” The basic idea is that commentators in the future may point towards the tendency of many people to spend time “browsing and tweeting” about the likes of Tila Tequilla as a key turning point in the breakdown of our society (if, indeed, society breaks down). As I kind of mention in my comment on the post, this inspired me to go back and re-visit Clay Shirky’s discussion of the “cognitive surplus” and think about it in relation to social media.

For those that may not recall, Clay came up with a pretty cool angle in relation to the Architecture of Participation (you can read a “lightly edited” transcript of a speech describing it here). The underlying argument was that just like gin was the critical technology of the industrial revolution (the transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden people needed to get drunk to cope), the sitcom was the critical technology of the 20th century (the increase in free time was so sudden people filled it with TV shows).

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