The Stack: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

Web-evangelist Clay has a point, but will his zealotry alienate the browsing masses?

By Paul M. Barrett

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Shirky offers a lively tour of the left-leaning public-spirited precincts of the Internet; very useful for the digital liberal

The Bad: His tendency to preach about the wonders of online life obscures the complexity of the networked world, including the fact that a lot of activism online isn't left-of-center

The Bottom Line: Internet evangelists can be inspiring, but also annoying

Reader Reviews

Cognitive Surplus:
Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
By Clay Shirky
The Penguin Press, 242 pp, $25.95

Internet missionaries can be terribly annoying. Part of the reason—especially to the print dinosaurs among us—is that they're so correct. Broken old media businesses will change or die. Younger audiences will not just read or watch; they must tweet, blog, and update their status, preferably all at once. More broadly, digital networks are reshaping culture, economics, and politics. That's beyond debate. Like most zealots, however, the Web evangelists often seem self-righteous and oblivious to ambiguity. This trait threatens to limit their appeal even to the already converted.

In his first book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky explained how wikis and flash mobs altered social relations. His new work, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, extends the upbeat argument. By "cognitive surplus," Shirky means potential free time. Right now we're wasting gobs of it on embarrassingly bad television, he writes, and we could do an awful lot of good if we devoted even a few hours apiece to, say, online civic groups. Shirky takes as an example Grobanites for Charity, a far-flung bunch of young women that raises money to help humanity via a website named for their favorite shaggy-chic pop-opera star, Josh Groban. Even if you don't share the Grobanites' taste in music, it's a cool little story about the Internet at its best.

What distinguishes Cognitive Surplus from the recent wave of digital-cheerleading books is its ability to show how the medium is well-suited to serving social causes. Shirky, who teaches in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, tells crisp, memorable parables. As with most parables, his are populated by two-dimensional characters meant to impart simple lessons. Shades of gray are largely absent. We meet plucky teenagers in South Korea who organize online to protest against American beef imports in the wake of mad cow disease. In Kenya a courageous political blogger starts a website that aggregates citizen reports of outbreaks of ethnic violence. Intrepid vacationers click on CouchSurfing.org to find volunteer hosts, while PickupPal.com matches carpoolers more efficiently than was possible by phone. The anecdotes lift the spirit, even for a reader who wouldn't dream of traveling across Europe based on digital reservations for crashing on the couches of complete strangers.

By the middle of this slim volume, however, one notices a certain sameness in the creativity and generosity Shirky heralds. Everyone online seems inoffensive and vaguely progressive. From this sampling, Shirky draws odd generalizations. "Because the social tools we now have can shape public speech and civic action," he writes, "people who design and use them have joined the experimental wing of political philosophy." When did carpooling, admirable as it may be, become a branch of political philosophy?

A lot of people who design and use newfangled social tools are pretty conventional in their thinking—and their opinions don't all point in one direction. Pro-gun, anti-gun. Pro-choice, anti-abortion. Balance the budget, stimulate the economy. They're all out there online, soliciting contributions, hyper-linking, selling ads, and arguing their briefs. It often seems more like a wearisome cognitive overload than an invigorating cognitive surplus.

The Internet, through its very nature, amplifies all ideas, good and bad. It's just as useful to al Qaeda and child-porn merchants as it is to healthy-beef activists. It's a mixed bag, not an unmitigated blessing. While the Web may empower people to do good in previously unimaginable ways, one can still appreciate new forms of networked munificence without turning digital communication into a religion.

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