Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008
|
Edit video information Language: English (English) Subtitles: 
Slovenian
(Slovenščina)
[Edit subtitles]
Other languages: 
English
Bosanski
עברית
Transcribe video | Upload subtitles OR Translate this Slovenian subtitles to Transcript belowJe eden najbolj inspirativnih govornikov in mislecev v tej industriji.Nedavno avtor knjige "Here comes everybody", lepo dobrodošel Clay Shirky. Nedavno sem se spomnil nekega čtiva iz gimnazije, daleč nazaj v prejšnjem stoletju, o industrijski revoluciji, v katerem je britanski zgodovinar razlagal, da je bila kritična tehnologija v zgodnji fazi industrijske revolucije -- gin. Prehod iz podeželskega v mestno življenje je bil tako hiter in tako boleč, da je družba lahko storila le eno -- zapila se v omamo za celo generacijo. Zgodbe iz tega časa so neverjetne -- polni vozički gina se se prebijali po ulicah Londona. In šele ko se je družba prebudila iz tega skupinskega pijančevanja, smo začeli dobivati inštitucije, ki jih danes povezujemo z industrijsko revolucijo. Javne knjižnice in muzeje, izobrazbo za otroke, izvoljene voditelje, veliko dobrih stvari -- se ni zgodilo, dokler ni toliko ljudi na kupu prenehalo izgledati kot kriza in začelo izgledati kot prednost. Šele, ko so ljudje na to začeli gledati kot na mestni presežek, za katerega lahko ustvarjajo, namesto da ga zapravljajo, smo dobili to, čemur danes pravimo industrijska družba. Če bi moral izbrati kritično tehnologijo za 20. stoletje, tisto socialno mazivo, brez katerega bi družbi odpadla kolesa, bi rekel, da so bile to TV nadaljevanke. Od Druge svetovne vojne se je zgodilo veliko sprememb: večanje BDP, vedno boljše izobraževanje, povečevanje življenjske dobe in, kritično, vedno večje število ljudi s petdnevnimi delovnimi tedni. Prvič je družba ogromno število ljudi prisilila, da upravljajo z nečim, s čimer niso še nikoli dotlej: s prostim časom. In kaj smo storili z vsem tem prostim časom? No, povečini smo paničarili -- in gledali TV. To smo počeli desetletja. Gledali smo "Rad imam Lucy". Gledali smo "Gilliganov otok". Gledali smo Glavco. Gledamo Razočarane gospodinje. Razočarane gospodinje v bistvu delujejo kot nekakšen umski hladilnik, odvzemajo razmišljanje, ki bi se drugače lahko nabiralo in povzročalo pregrevanje družbe. In šele zdaj, ko se prebujamo iz tega skupinskega pijančevanja, začenjamo ta umski presežek razumevati kot prednost, namesto kot krizo. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that, to deploy that in ways that are more than just piping it to some heatsink in everybody's basement. This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, I'm not going to talk about the book today, you can buy a copy downstairs A little superliminal advertising. But this was a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show or not. And she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?" I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. Which is one of the ones I've been tracking over the years. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing things, and the whole community is in a crisis, about, "How should we characterize this?" And a little bit at a time they move the article -- fighting offstage all the while from, "Pluto was the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system. " So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever. " That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" hat was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "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. 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. And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U. S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U. S. , we spend 100 million hours a weekend, watching just the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia, don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation. Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first You can't -- hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if you knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something until people start experimenting with it and finding their way through to new ways of using this, that the surplus gets integrated, and in the course of that integration it transforms society. The early phase, 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. So 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. Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. You can find thousands of these things. There's a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. And a couple of weeks ago one of my students at NYU forwarded me this thing he'd done. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring. Now, this is tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark. " But it's something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no source where you can take advantage of it. There is no single public source. And the cops, if they have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now. " Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing five years ago. So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves. " At least they're doing something. Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, 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. And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, what it essentially says is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too. " And that's a big change. I could do that, too. This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? an we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when people are offered the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less. And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U. S. consumption. That is 10000 Wikipedia projects a year worth of participation. I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you? Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "No, this isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and kind of settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting, at the other end of the scale. I'm not sure she believed me. The argument I was making is that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into. But I'm not sure she believed me, in part because she didn't want to believe me, but also in part because I didn't have the right story yet. And now I do. I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse. " Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. And that's what I'm basing my assumption on that this is a one-way change, because the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, the people who don't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through, of trying to unpack a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, Those people are reacting to the assumption that media includes consuming, producing and sharing. It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing --and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. That's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carved out a little bit of the cognitive surplus we now recognize we can deploy, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes. Thank you very much.
EmbedCopy this snippet into your page:(This is will allways display the latest version of subtitles)
|