Clay Shirky vs. Cultural Studies?

Over the last week or so, there have been quite a few responses to a recent talk by Clay Shirky in which he discusses our collective "cognitive surplus" that is now being harnessed by participatory, Web 2.0, produsage initiatives. Shirky's talk has been praised by some, and condemned by others; negative responses seem to focus especially on his apparent disdain for television, which he describes as a kind of "cognitive heatsink", dispersing surplus cognitive energy. (Skip to about 1:50 in the video below.)

Such criticism has been particularly vocal coming from the direction of cultural studies researchers, and while I take the point that Shirky expresses his views in this context somewhat inelegantly, I'd also suggest that cultural studies is perhaps just a tiny bit overprotective of television on this score. It seems to me that TV is something of a sacred cow for cultural studies: the realisation that television and other leisure activities do not simply constitute passive consumerism, but can be understood as active forms of engagement with media - even as practices of cultural citizenship, as John Hartley has described them -, can rightly be seen as one of cultural studies' major achievements.

So, on average, watching TV does not simply mean that our minds switch into neutral gear. We process what we see, we discuss our interpretations with friends and family, we might even shout at the screen. (That's not to say that some shows don't serve as mere moving wallpaper, though.) Indeed, the responses to Shirky's talk (which is itself presented as streaming media, that is, as a more flexible form of television) are themselves good examples of this.

But at the same time, I don't think that's the point that Shirky is trying to make, and the various commentators' focus on how he describes TV is obscuring what is a much more important observation. Shirky's main point is that media habits, media diets are beginning to shift, and that this is likely to have profound implications especially for participatory, collaborative, produsage projects. In the Australian context, this is also backed up by a recent Cisco survey which found that "people with broadband connections spend more time on the net than watching television" - which is roughly comparable with broader, global trends, it seems.

The shift, then, is not in the first place from passive media consumption to active media participation (and this is where Shirky's rhetoric is most problematic). But it is a shift from the reception of one-way, broadcast media, for which I would suggest meaning-making practices remain more often internal to the receiver, to the reception (at first) of two-way, online media for which meaning-making practices can more easily lead to the externalisation and sharing of receiver's responses. (As Jill Walker writes, television is a medium "that forces activity outside of itself", while on the Web "the 'talking back' is built into the medium, and becomes visible on a far greater scale".)

Put another way: we may be just as involved in engaging with TV-based media as we do with Web-based media; we may create the same amount of meaning for ourselves from doing so. If - following Shirky's metaphor - ideas are energy, then an hour of television might have created the same amount of energy as an hour of Web browsing. Online media, though, could be described as more conductive: they provide us with more opportunity to transmit that energy, speedily and over long distances, to others; to combine and pool those energies, and to harness them in the generation of new media content (which in turn may become the basis for new energy generation).

There's no automatism here; not everyone browsing the Web does transmit their newly-generated ideas/energy that way. But, and this is Shirky's main point, if only a fraction of the energy generation process that used to be stimulated by television has now shifted to online environments (and studies like Cisco's clearly say that it has), and if only a fraction of the energy generated in those environments is harnessed as input into collaborative projects, that's still a massive load of energy to work with.

Talk of "heatsinks" and "cognitive surpluses" aside, I think he's on to something there - and it certainly provides an explanation of how a massive, multinational project like Wikipedia could develop so successfully in less than a decade, and offers hope that there remains energy to spare for many more Wikipedias to come.

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