Cognitive Surplus – Book Notes
Booknotes for Clay Shirky’s latest book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. This book is certainly worth a read. (My notes in red, text in black are direct quotes.)
One thing that makes the current age remarkable is that we can now treat free time as a general social asset that can harnessed for large, communally created projects, rather than as a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person at a time. (How do we harness students’ free time in school and out?) p. 10
[several population studies have found] young populations with access to fast, interactive media are shifting their behavior away from media that presupposes pure consumption. p. 11 (Traditional media outlets view their audience as being passive consumers. They have trouble with the “active” part. Reminds me of how traditional educators view students and how active behavior is often frowned upon. (Example of college students who set up online study group being put on probation; the whole issue of what constitutes student cheating.))
[quoting Ito:] Although so much of what kids are doing online may look trivial and frivolous, what they are doing is building the capacity to connect, to communicate, and to ultimately, to mobilize. p. 38
Curiously, an organization that commits to helping society manage a problem also commits itself to the preservation of that same problem, as its institutional existence hinges on society’s continued need for its management. p. 41 (One of the clear reasons schools want to manage students’ learning and are unwilling to give more choice and freedom to students (and parents). See Clayton Christensen’s book.)
Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes rare, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change. Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity. When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much value is tied to its scarcity. p 50-51
The people surprised at our new behaviors assume that behavior is a stable category, but it isn’t. Human motivations change little over the years, but opportunity can change a little or a lot, depending on the social environment. In a world where opportunity changes little, behavior will change little, but when opportunity changes a lot, behavior will as well, so long as the opportunities appeal to real human motivations. p 63 (What opportunities have changed in schools over the last 10 years for students, admin and teachers? Among staff, why do some jump on these opportunities while others don’t? The rift between opportunities inside the school and outside of it continues to grow larger, leading to tension for both students and staff.)
Deci then ran a third session, where he repeated the experiment as he had run it initially: [assemble shapes, with no pay for anyone] In this session, even though each subject received identical instructions, the ones who had been paid in the previous session showed markedly less interest in the shapes during the break than in the session where they had been paid; their average time spent dropped by two minutes, which is to say, it fell twice as far, when the payment was removed, as it had risen when the payment was added in the first place. Even though they had played with the puzzle voluntarily in the first session, the memory of having been paid earlier was enough to depress their interest when they were again given the chance to experiment with the puzzle on their own. p 71 (Pink writes about this also in Drive. Interesting all the accolades schools like the Harlem schools (Geoffrey Canada) get for paying students for getting good grades. Wouldn’t this be counterproductive if we want to foment “love of learning”? Hmm.)
But Deci’s experiment suggested that extrinsic motivations aren’t always the most effective ones and that increasing extrinsic motivations can actually decrease intrinsic ones. (e.g. love of learning, curiosity). p 72
…in real world situations where money was offered as a reward for volunteering, it depressed the number of hours of labor the average volunteer contributed. p. 73 (Reminds me of how we “pay” students with grades/right to graduate for their “service learning” efforts. Seems like this approach would diminish the likelihood and amount of volunteering in the future. Also, if you are forced to do something, how can it be seen as volunteering? Hmm.)
Deci identifies two intrinsic motivations that might be labeled “personal”: the desire to be autonomous (to determine what we do and how we do it) [see post] and the desire to be competent (to be good at what we do). In the Soma experiment, the students who continued to play with the pieces during their break were motivated by desires both for autonomy (the work was under their control) and for competence. (Soma is a game where continued effort brings improvements in skill.) This finding is typical of games. A study of video games concluded that the principal draw for the players was not graphics and gore but the feelings of control and competence the players could attain as they mastered the game. p. 76
(Deci focuses on personal motivation while Benkler and Nissenbaum focus on social motivations. ) …motivations that we can feel only when we are part of a group. They divide social motivations into two broad clusters—one around connectedness or membership, and the other around sharing and generosity. (later on page) Benkler and Nissenbaum conclude that social motivations reinforce the personal ones; our new communications networks encourage membership and sharing, both of which are good in and of themselves, and they also provide support for autonomy and competence. p. 78 (Kind of like me sharing these notes online; I’ll take better notes knowing others may see them and therefore I become more competent understanding it. Makes me think how the idea of sharing is seen as anathema in schools. “They were caught sharing their work.” Also how pitting students against each others (e.g. class rank) reduces the chance of sharing and students wanting to be helpful. Bad design.)
One of the weakest notions in the entire pop culture canon is that of innate generational difference, the idea that today’s thirty-somethings are members of a class of people called Generation X while twentysomethings are part of Generation Y, and that both differ innately from each other ad from the baby boomers. The conceptual appeal of these labels is enormous, but the idea’s explanatory value is almost worthless, a kind of astrology for decades instead of months. p. 121 (Totally agree. It’s about context, opportunity. We are more alike than different.)
…the desire to attribute people’s behavior to innate character rather than to local context runs deep. It runs so deep in fact, that psychologists have a name for it: the fundamental attribution error. [later, next page] To understand why so many people are spending time and energy exploring new forms of connection, you have to overcome the fundamental attribution error and extend to other people the set of explanations that ou use to describe our own behavior: you respond to new opportunities, and so does everyone else, and these changes feed on one another, amplifying some kinds of behavior and damping others. p. 121-122 (”kids today are so lazy” “they have short attention spans” “they don’t listen”…Context: When a 50 year old today was a kid and they were reading, they didn’t have 20 tabs open on a browser or a ringing cel phone nearby. In school, they didn’t have the opportunity to sneak in a text message. There were fewer distractors that create the kind of behavior that people complain about today.)
We create one another’s opportunities, whether for passivity or for activity, and we have always done so. The difference today is that the internet is an opportunity machine, a way for small groups to create new opportunities, at lower cost and with less hassle than ever before, and to advertise those opportunities to the largest set of potential participants in history. p. 129
[New opportunities are being created by Us by our new tools. The driving forces are: loosely coordinated groups with a shared culture to perform tasks more effectively than 1) individuals 2) markets 3) governments using managerial direction.] paraphrased, p. 129 (What does that do to schools which currently fall under the purview of individuals, markets and governments?)
Elinor Ostrom … notes that much twentieth-century economics mistakenly assumed that market transactions are an ideal and even default model for human interactions. But some kinds of value can’t be created by markets, only by a set of shared and mutually coordinating assumptions, which is to say by culture. p. 136
“Knowledge is the most combinable thing we have, but taking advantage of it requires special conditions.” (they are…1) size of community, 2) cost of sharing, 3) clarity of what gets shared, and the 4) cultural norms of the recipients. Ideas from Dominique Foray, French economist). p. 141 (Makes me think of Google Translate as an innovation machine since it directly addresses items 1, 2, 3 above.)
It’s tempting to imagine a broad conversation about what we as a society should do with the possibilities and virtues of participation. Such a conversation will never happen. If you do a web search for “we as a society” you will find a litany of failed causes, because society isn’t the kind of unit that can have conversations, come to decisions, and take action. p. 186 (e.g. “We as a society should look at the possibilities that new technologies offer for learning, and adopt them in schools.”)
We are living through the disorientation that comes from including two billion new participants in a media landscape previously operated by a small group of professionals. p186 (or… We are living through the disorientation that comes from including two billion new possible learners in learning environments previously operated by a small group of professionals (schools).)
The communication tools we now have, which merely a decade ago seemed to offer an improvement to the twentieth-century media landscape, are now seen to rapidly eroding it instead. p. 189 (Those rascally kids don’t do their homework anymore because they’re on Facebook all the time! Damn this technology!!)
A society where everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere is a different kind of society than one where citizens approach media as mere consumers. p. 188 (or approach learning as mere consumers.)
As Joshua Porter [social media designer] explains to his clients, “The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for.” p. 196 Makes me think of Dina Strasser’s post, continued: Users will only take advantage of opportunities they understand and that seem interesting or valuable. Porter is in effect telling his clients: It doesn’t matter how much you want users to behave a certain way. What matters is how they react to the opportunities you give them. If you want different behavior, you have to provide different opportunities. (How would schools be different if they were designed with that last sentence in mind?)
We can’t ask people running traditional systems to evaluate a new technology for its radical benefits; people committed to keeping the current system will tend, as a group, to have trouble seeing value in anything disruptive. p 210 (Reminds me of what Clay Christensen says in Disrupting Class.)
The world’s people, and the connections among us, provide the raw material for cognitive surplus. The technology will continue to improve, and the population will continue to grow, but change in the direction of more participation has already happened. What matters most is our imaginations. The opportunity before us, individually and collectively, is enormous; what we do with it will be determined largely by how well we are able to imagine and reward public creativity, participation, and sharing. p. 212
Here’s something four year olds know: a screen without a mouse is missing something. Here’s something else they know: media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. p. 212 (And it appears that they also know this: education that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. That has a name: ADHD, high drop-out rates.)
…we’re looking for the mouse. We look everywhere a reader or a viewer or a patient [a student] or a citizen has been locked out of creating and sharing, or has been served up passive or canned experience, and we’re asking. If we carve out a little of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen? I’m betting the answer is yes, or could be yes, if we give one another the opportunity to participate and reward one another for trying. p. 213
