Having read resources offered by Frank, I’d like to elevate one. Clay Shirkey: Gin, Television and Social Surplus. April 23, 2008.
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
[]
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.
Questions about how people use time, these days, may be framed (and analyzed,) within the rubric of behavioral economics. (I can’t do this myself, like Mr. Shirkey, I’m only able to offer phenomenological intuitions.) Still, I bring the frame of ‘time investment’ up because I suppose a finely differentiated analysis of how people actually deploy their time, with various internet utilities comprising part of the picture, would enrich intuitions.
For example, as I’ve mentioned before, a music fan can acquire more music (mp3s) than this fan can expect to deal with in the old sense of ‘dealing.’ This is true for other resources, such as ebooks, articles, movies, software; is true for any ‘object of potential interest’ discovered in the web, (or candy shop,) of intended and unintended distribution.
Time deployment exists in various contexts. These contexts can be described too. (I’m fairly sure Shirkey’s idealization doesn’t wash, were it to be suffer the details.) I wonder if cognitive surplus is accompanied in specific cases with its own surplus-derived stress?
What would constitute a robust conceptual ecology with respect to the factors of time investment and anticipation of benefit? Each of these is a very broad brush. For example how would time spent commenting on blog posts be accounted for were some benefit to figure into the account?
Another feature–these days–I term, truncation. Twitter exemplifies this, yet, also there are the short form messages tacked to Facebook walls, terse emails, blog and forum comments, abbreviated annotations of various sorts, and, of course, text messages.
I reckon truncation is not the result of having too much time.
i sortov played with this idea in the stuff on email – do the typos, missed spellings, etc signal a type of spontaneous writing style akin to speaking or conversation, or, because it is possible to edit one’s posts, and one is aware of the audience in some ways, are these ‘errors’ left in on purpose, to signal a chatty informality?
in the case of truncation, i do not think it has much to do with the latter. rather, as you imply, it has to do with rather less time.
these days, i think people have less time to relax – there’s too much information to take in and yep, maybe stress results from that. but also stress can be related to having too much time as well.
i was thinking about the cognitive surplus thing yesterday – after bookmarking the URL to that essay by shirky – and i thought, well, i am not using mine well. whatever extra time i have, i seem to spend it staring at a plant in the backyard. or, this morning i found myself frozen clutching my sarong in a non-practical manner having been careful not to scare the small skink lizards that come out and run here and there searching for something on the plant beds. meanwhile i think, maybe i should be doing some work…
Meanwhile, the stress caused by too much time is, obviously, the stress caused by not having enough time.
Different modes of internet interpersonal communication provide different loading factor for time deployment. Rough hypothesis: given specific written modalities, verbal truncation is the intentional result of managing time within specific time-pressured contexts.
Anecdotal evidence: I myself, in my professional usage of email, have to consciously dial back my propensity to be verbose. There are two reasons to do so. One. it is the norm in business communications to be concise; two, it is the usual case in the context of business communications that people are buried in email. Consider people may be buried in concise email!
Aside from that context, I notice over the past few years that there is a kind of Twitter effect. Casual emails have become more concise; there’s more use of truncated communication styles in the move from email to posting on Facebook ‘walls.’
What I feel is this reduces the granularity and depth of communication. Over time might this also result in changes in the way messages are coded in a linguistic sense?
E, have you noticed anything like these phenomena?
i have not done any analysis of large swatches of internet-mediated communication of late to say whether this type of phenomenon is ‘widespread’ or not. it is possible that some of the publications mentioned on the blog whose link i recently posted might have some actual evidence one way or the other.
when writing to friends, i may start off with something to say, but then allow myself to wander into saying whatever comes to mind that i think that person might be interested in. i have had some of those people mention in response the long email in approving terms – thus indicating, if you will, that these recipients are now used to receiving shorter, briefer emails. my longer one may therefore represent a marked case.
The FAQ explains it all:
http://02d9656.netsoljsp.com/SarcMark/modules/user/commonfiles/loadhome.do
Will this succeed or grow into something far bigger, is this one of the viral essences we have started to witness? More thoughts on that from here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Another point is that studies are starting to come in:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx?r=1
how tiresome!
anyway, the sarcmark looks like a fair enough tool for some areas of social interaction… when only the lowest form of wit will do?
anyway, yep, at the moment i happen to be reading a book called “Linked (how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science, and everyday life)” by albert-laszlo barabasi (due to several references to this book in the aformentioned ‘cyberchiefs’ book). so far i am finding it rather light reading, and telling me nothing new except about the history of network theory as promugated by mathematicians and a little known hungarian writer who first proposes the ’6 degrees of separation’ idea, although he didnt put it in those terms….
but it is early days yet.