“Cognitive Surplus represents the ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects.” Clay Shirky, TEDTalk
According to Shirky we live in a time of ‘cognative surplus’. That, because of modern technology, we are in a burgeoning era of utilizing the world’s collective available free time and talent, and that that time, coupled with our human desire to help each other and act as engaged citizens, has created an abundance of opportunity for creating “goodness” for the betterment of humanity.
Jay Rosen, liberal media critic, writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University, takes this thinking one step further in his article “The People Formerly Known as Audience” and posits that we as individuals, and as collective witnesses to society, are now the creators of our media. We are the readers that write and the viewers that film. He proposes that we are in a process of moving away from the traditional paradigm of “big media” where a few oligarchical corporations are at the top of the information food chain supplying news to the masses, and are creating our own consumable content.
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According to Yochai Benkler, the emergence of the networked information economy “has the potential to increase individual autonomy”, and participatory communication can lead to a “more critical and self reflective culture.” In The Networked Information Society Benkler describes our world of social information abundance as a Networked Information Economy (NIE), a “technological-economic feasibility space” that, similar to Rosen and Shirky’s work, is possible because we have a (mostly) unimpeded ability to generate information and access to share that info worldwide.
But are we really entering into (or already in) a utopia of free thought and creative expression? Or are we living in variation of Habermas’ refeudalization of the public sphere— an age of “digital refeudalization”?
Theorist Douglas Kellener explores Habermas’ refeudalization in his work Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention, “The transformation [to refeudalization] involved private interests assuming direct political functions, as powerful corporations came to control and manipulate the media and state. On the other hand, the state began to play a more fundamental role in the private realm and everyday life, thus eroding the difference between state and civil society, between the public and private sphere. As the public sphere declined, citizens became consumers, dedicating themselves more to passive consumption and private concerns than to issues of the common good and democratic participation.”
A recent CBC article and radio program hosted by Ramona Pringle explores the evolution of big data to the top of the economic food chain.
“There was a time that oil companies ruled the globe, but “black gold” is no longer the world’s most valuable resource — it’s been surpassed by data. The five most valuable companies in the world today — Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google’s parent company Alphabet — have commodified data and taken over their respective sectors.”
—‘Data is the new oil’: Your personal information is now the world’s most valuable commodity, CBC
We, as users of these social media sites, are the decomposing dinosaur goo supplying the oil for these companies to sell to their customers. Our likes, visits, shares, and comments are all stored, packaged and sold to the highest bidder. All the data collected on our demographic preferences are a hotter sell than 1996 Tickle-Me-Elmos.
Within the cognitive surplus that Shirky speaks to, exists a spectrum of content and purpose. From #LOLcats and bulldog videos to more universal good initiatives like Ushahidi. (Though one could argue the “social good” bulldog videos offer society on a Monday morning as also fairly important.)
As the public sphere declined, citizens became consumers, dedicating themselves more to passive consumption and private concerns than to issues of the common good and democratic participation.
But I wonder if our creation of mass content, as the writers of what we read, are we not merely creating our own societal human centipede of media consumption. Or to throw another equally ugly metaphor into the mix, are we the fatted geese eating our own livers for the benefit of an elite few?
Resources
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven [Conn.: Yale University Press.
Kellner, D. (2014). Habermas, the public sphere, and democracy. In Re-imagining public space (pp. 19-43). Palgrave Macmillan US.
Pringle, R. (2017, August 25). ‘Data is the new oil’: Your personal information is now the world’s most valuable commodity. CBC News, Technology & Science. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/data-is-the-new-oil-1.4259677
Rosen, J. (2011, May 25). The People Formerly Known as the Audience. Huffington Post.Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-rosen/the-people-formerly-known_1_b_24113.html
Shirky, C. (2010, June). Clay Shirky: How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world
Tickle-Me-Elmo. (n.d.) In Wikipedia. Retrieved August 22, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickle_Me_Elmo#1996_Elmo_craze
WebpageFX Data (n.d.) The 6 Companies That Own (almost) All Media. Retrieved from https://www.webpagefx.com/data/the-6-companies-that-own-almost-all-media
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