Book review: Cognitive Surplus

I DOUBT that the social networking expert and internet guru Clay Shirky has even seen the 1970s children's programme Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go And Do Something Less Boring Instead. But that sums up his thesis on "cognitive surplus" and, indeed, is as unwittingly ironic.

Shirky begins his polemic, subtitled "Creativity and Generosity In A Connected Age" with an altercation with a TV executive. "Where do people find the time?" asked the producer, propos Wikipedia's entry on Pluto. "No-one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from," he angrily retorts. The old model of top-down media, with professional producers and amateur consumers is, he argues, in the process of far-reaching and revolutionary change. Liberated couch potatoes are using new media to create a new, communal future.

Shirky does not shy from the sublime or the ridiculous. On one hand, he provides examples of creative and intelligent online phenomena - such as the Kenyan Ushahidi project, which allowed for the documentation of ethnic violence; the Canadian carpooling resource PickupPal; and the Indian "pink chaddi" Facebook campaign against religious extremism - which have a civic good. Shirky writes: "The old view of online as a separate space, cyberspace, apart from the real world was an accident of history. Our social media tools aren't an alternative to real life, they are part of it."

But for every such beneficial innovation, there are inanities like lolcats, YouTube videos of children falling over, and Harry Potter fan fiction. Shirky is refreshingly unelitist, and sees many of the more trivial aspects of the online world as part of its inherent freedom. If you allow people to choose what they do, you can't legislate for their choices - as shown by Raoul Moat's Facebook tribute page. The "down-shift" in quality may be palpable, but Shirky argues the greater freedom is a price worth paying.

Shirky goes further and argues that amateurism is a fundamental good: that anything you make yourself has a quality beyond what you might passively receive - or in his words, "the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act". It's at this point that I slightly part company with him. I don't want to write a novel, but I do want to read them. As Jaron Lanier has argued in You Are Not A Gadget, there is a real danger that the internet will "self-cannibalise". Much online discussion deals with art, music, film, television shows and books, but the widespread breaches in copyright endanger their future production.

Shirky's flippant attitude towards this seems undermined by the fact that Cognitive Surplus is not available for free online but will cost 20 from a bookshop.Like Why Don't You, it preaches one thing while being the opposite. In his section on Napster, the music file-sharing system, Shirky accuses the music industry of sheer spite - "the decision not to make someone's life better when it would cost you little or nothing". But it's when he turns his ire on "professionals" that the book is weakest: he rather facetiously suggests that if we were really so in awe of the professional, why don't we all sleep with prostitutes? That's glib and in poor taste.

Where he does excel, though, is in the broader analysis of changing media. For a book about projections, Cognitive Surplus is remarkably candid about the difficulty of making projections. In a very apposite section on Gutenberg's printing press, Shirky notes that the "paradox of revolution" is that "the bigger the opportunity offered by new tools, the less completely anyone can extrapolate the future from the previous shape of society". In his more idealistic moments, he suggests that the "big opportunity" may lead to a resurgence of activism and democracy, rather than the "atomised" future more sceptical writers have imagined.