TITLE: Cognitive Surplus and the Future of Programming
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 20, 2008 12:47 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
I grew up on the sitcom of the 1970s and 1980s. As kids,
we watched almost everything we saw in reruns, whether from
the '60s or the '70s, but I enjoyed so many of them. By the time I got
to college, I had well-thought ideas on why
The Dick Van Dyke Show
remains one of the best sitcoms ever, why
WKRP in Cincinnati
was underrated for its quality, and why
All in the Family
was _the_ best sitcom ever. I still hold all these biases
in my heart. Of course, I didn't limit myself to sitcoms;
I also loved light-action dramas, especially
The Rockford Files.
Little did I know then that my TV viewing was soaking up a
cognitive surplus in a time of social transition, or that it
had anything in common with gin pushcarts in the streets of
London at the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
Clay Shirky has published a wonderful little essay,
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
that taught me these things and put much of what we see on
happening on the web into the context of a changing social,
cultural, and economic order. Shirky contends that, as our
economy and technology evolve, a "cognitive surplus" is
created. Energy that used to be spent on activities required
in the old way is now freed for other purposes. But society
doesn't know what to do with this surplus immediately, and
so there is a transition period where the surplus is
dissipated in (we hope) harmless ways.
My generation, and perhaps my parents', was part of this
transition. We consumed media content produced by others.
Some denigrate that era as one of mindless consumption,
but I think we should not be so harsh. Shows like All
in the Family and, yes, WKRP in Cincinnati
often tackled issues on the fault lines of our culture and
gave people a different way to be exposed to new ideas.
Even more frivolous shows such as The Dick Van Dyke
Show and The Rockford Files helped people
relax and enjoy, and this was especially useful for those
who were unprepared for the expectations of a new world.
We are now seeing the advent of the new order in which
people are not relegated to consuming from the media
channels of others but are empowered to create and share
their own content. Much attention is given by Shirky and
many, many others to the traditional media such as audio
and video, and these are surely where the new generation
has had its first great opportunities to shape its world.
As Shirky says:
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships
without a mouse ships broken. Here's something
four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but
doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.
But as I've been writing about here, lets not forget the
next step: the power to create and shape the media
themselves via programming. When people can write
programs, they are not relegated even to using the media
they have been given but are empowered to create new
media, and thus to express and share ideas that may
otherwise have been limited to the abstraction of words.
Flickr and YouTube didn't drop from the sky; people with
ideas created new channels of dissemination. The same
is true of tools like Photoshop and technologies such as
wikis: they are ideas turned into reality through code.
Do read Shirky's article, if you haven't already. It
has me thinking about the challenge we academics face in
reaching this new generation and engaging them in the
power that is now available to them. Until we understand
this world better, I think that we will do well to offer
young people lots of options -- different ways to connect,
and different paths to follow into futures that they are
creating.
One thing we can learn from the democratized landscape of
the web. I think, is that we are not offering one audience
many choices; we are offering many audiences the one or
two choices each that they need to get on board. We can
do this through programming courses aimed at different
audiences and through interdisciplinary major and minor
programs that embed the power of computing in the context
of problems and issues that matter to our students.
Let's keep around the good old CS majors as well, for
those students who want to go deep creating the technology
that others are using to create media and content -- just
as we can use the new technologies and media channels to
keep
great old sitcoms available
for geezers like me.
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