(Odd side-note: I spotted Clay Shirky (about half way down the page) among those who participated in a project my girlfriend ran as part of her art collective’s Windows Brooklyn project last summer.)

In a video and transcript from last April – yes, it takes me a while to process and write about things at times – Clay lays it out thus:

A British historian argued that the critical technology in the Industrial Revolution was Gin. The changes were so rapid and disruptive that the British went on a bender for a generation.

“And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today.”

The Sitcom was the US’ palliative after World War II. We suddenly found ourselves with free time and disposable income, and we started watching a lot of TV. A lot.

“And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.”

My favorite part of his thinking: He was talking to a TV journalist about the recent rash of conversation surrounding Pluto’s planetary classification on Wikipedia to which she responded: “Where do people find the time?” His response:

“No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

He estimates we expend

“About 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year … watching television… I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter. I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing.

Thus, the free time and brain time outside of work remains, the question is what percentage of it will be occupied by the completely unproductive versus the semi- and extremely productive? An example of a successful use of brain time, in this case for the common good, comes from InnoCentive where about 20% of their projects are non-profit. Uncompensated. Using people’s free time.

Going forward, the big thing will be experimenting and figuring out what works in collective work and production. As I have covered here, experiments abound, some successful, many not. There is a long way to go, but as Clay says, this is not something society will grow out of, but something society will grow into.

Cognitive Surplus. Love it.

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Cognitive Surplus: What are you going to do with yours? Clay Shirky explains… is a post from: co>innovative

Collaborative (or crowdsourced) content creation: A group effort to contribute to and edit portions of content for the expressed aim of producing a specific overarching project.

For some reason, examples of collaborative creativity keep popping up in the film-making arena. It’s Our Movie began with a script and a director (Alex Jovy, an Oscar Nominated Producer) and used the community to find its actors. (While this may not technically fall under “content creation”, it does bring a community into the overall creative process of a film.) Anyone could upload an audition for one of the characters and then the best were voted up. A Swarm Of Angels was a more ambitious project in which everything from the concept to script, casting to funding was created by the crowd. (It was up and running for several years but now the website is under construction, status unclear.)

CoWrite is essentially a script writing competition in 10 page increments. Each week anyone can enter a submission (along with $10) and, each week, the best entry is awarded $3,000 by an internal panel of judges and becomes the next 10 pages of the script. The final script will then be rewritten by one of the weekly winners who will be paid $5K. Another perk of winning is a meeting with Benderspink (Production company behin American Pie, A History of Violence) who will also review the final script and decide what to do with it from there.

Assignment Zero, a project sparked by Jeff Howe who coined “crowdsourcing” and Jay Rosen, began with the goal of having “a crowd of volunteers write the definitive report on how crowds of volunteers are upending established businesses, from software to encyclopedias and beyond.” Jeff Howe considered it “a highly satisfying failure“.

In some cases, the experience of contributing itself becomes the purpose of a project, not what is produced in the end. Contributing a sentence to a growing story can be enjoyable and creatively inspiring regardless of the poor end result of the totality of the project. And, as creative types know, most of what you produce, regardless of your brilliance and success, will be poor.

Any other examples I’ve missed?

Wikipedia
A Swarm of Angels
It’s Our Movie (The movie is in production as of winter 08/09.)
Ze Frank The great and noble Ze Frank who has called on his community to write, draw, execute power moves, and make earth sandwiches in order to create works of art and entertainment and bring joy to the downtrodden…
Assignment Zero
Protagonize supports “addventure” which is collaborative writing in which people can branch stories off into new paths
Spike Lee Nokia Ad

Read the rest of the Crowdsourcing article series.

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Part 8: Collaborative Content Creation; or, Crowdsourcing your way to creativity is a post from: co>innovative