Principled Innovation LLC

Cognitive surplus and new incentives for engagement

May 17th, 2008

In his keynote talk last month at the Web 2.0 conference, Here Comes Everybody author and recent P.I. podcast guest Clay Shirky offered a rough way to measure what he calls the “cognitive surplus,” i.e., the size of the time and attention asset available for online engagement:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

The 100 million hours devoted to the creation of Wikipedia is a mere fraction of the 200 billion hours of television viewed in the U.S. every year. According to Shirky, as we reduce our passive television consumption and connect with media that actively engage our participation, we are experimenting with our newly-discovered surplus, looking for different ways to use it and finding our way in the process. As Clay writes:

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we’re still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you’re going. That’s the phase we’re in now.

For associations, Shirky’s “cognitive surplus,” as well as the broad experimentation with its use currently in progress, offers a huge strategic opportunity to create new incentives for engagement. Keep in mind that this opportunity exists not only in the actual application of social technologies, but in how the attributes of these tools force us to deconstruct and recombine the core elements of our traditional architectures of participation. It’s not simply about being social, but about how being social fundamentally changes what our organizations do and what they are.

The challenge for associations is to become as granular and modular as possible, remembering that for Wikipedia “…every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code…” combined to create a game-changing resource that has left an indelible impression on our society. Try to imagine what your association might create if it can harness more of the cognitive surplus your current and potential stakeholders bring to the table!

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