Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution

People don't just do things for money, says Pink (left). 'We do thingsbecause they are interesting.'
Illustration: Sean McCabe; Pink: Jerry Bauer; Shirky: Oscar Espiritusanto Nicolas

Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink have led eerily parallel lives. Both grew up in Midwest university towns in the 1970s, where they spent their formative years watching television after school and at night. Both later went to Yale (a BA in painting for Shirky, a law degree for Pink). And both eventually abandoned their chosen fields to write about technology, business, and society.

Now their paths are intersecting. In December, Pink, a Wired contributing editor, came out with Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. The book digs through more than five decades of behavioral science to challenge the orthodoxy that carrots and sticks are the most effective ways to motivate workers in the 21st century. Instead, he argues, the most enduring motivations aren’t external but internal—things we do for our own satisfaction.

And in June, Shirky is publishing Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, which mines adjacent territory. He argues that the time Americans once spent watching television has been redirected toward activities that are less about consuming and more about engaging—from Flickr and Facebook to powerful forms of online political action. (For an alternate perspective on the influence of the Internet, see Nicholas Carr’s essay) And these efforts aren’t fueled by external rewards but by intrinsic motivation—the joy of doing something for its own sake.

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Wired had the two sit down for a conversation about motivation and media, social networking, sitcoms, and why the hell people spend their free time editing Wikipedia.

Pink: A few days ago, I was talking with someone about Wikipedia. And the guy shook his head dismissively and said about the people who contribute to it: “Where do they get the time?” We both think that’s a silly question.

Shirky: It is. People have had lots of free time for as long as there’s been the industrialized world. But that free time has mainly been something to be used up rather than used, especially in postwar America, with the rise of suburbanization and long commutes. Suddenly we no longer lived in tight-knit communities and therefore we spent less time interacting face-to-face. As a result, we ended up spending the bulk of our free time watching television.

Pink: The numbers on that are astonishing.

Shirky: Staggering. Someone born in 1960 has watched something like 50,000 hours of television already. Fifty thousand hours—more than five and a half solid years.

Pink: You’ve just described our boyhoods.

Shirky: Yes, sitting in front of the television.

Pink: Passively watching Gilligan’s Island and The Partridge Family.

Shirky: Oh, that walk down memory lane is painful. Somehow, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. But once we stop thinking of all that time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world’s educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource. It’s what I refer to as the cognitive surplus.

Pink: A surplus that post-TV media—blogs, wikis, and Twitter—can tap for other, often more valuable, uses.

Shirky: That’s what’s happening. Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.

Pink: Any sense of how much of that giant block of free time is being redirected?

Shirky: We’re still in the very early days. So far, it’s largely young people who are exploring the alternatives, but already they are having a huge impact. We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, for example, using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor. That’s a lot of time. But remember: Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year.

Pink: Amazing. All the time that people devote to Wikipedia—which that guy considered weird and wasteful—is really a tiny portion of our worldwide cognitive surplus. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.

Shirky: And it represents a very different and very powerful type of motivation.

Pink: Exactly. Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it’s pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.

Shirky: That’s for sure.

Pink: We have a biological drive. We eat when we’re hungry, drink when we’re thirsty, have sex to satisfy our carnal urges. We also have a second drive—we respond to rewards and punishments in our environment. But what we’ve forgotten—and what the science shows—is that we also have a third drive. We do things because they’re interesting, because they’re engaging, because they’re the right things to do, because they contribute to the world. The problem is that, especially in our organizations, we stop at that second drive. We think the only reason people do productive things is to snag a carrot or avoid a stick. But that’s just not true. Our third drive—our intrinsic motivation—can be even more powerful.

Shirky: That’s what’s behind people who are writing fan fiction or organizing ride-sharing online or using mobile phones to report on natural disasters or political upheaval. They’re motivated by something other than money.

Pink: But when the most powerful medium in the world was geared around consumption and passivity rather than creation and sharing, that kind of motivation often remained latent.

Shirky: Right—because television crowded out other forms of social engagement. Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.

Pink: Think about open source software in general—whether it’s Linux or Apache. Suppose I’d gone to an economist or management consultant 25 years ago and said, “I’ve got a cool new business model for making software. Here’s how it works: A bunch of intrinsically motivated people around the world get together to do technically sophisticated stuff for no pay. And then after working really hard, they give away their product for free. Trust me: It’s going to be huge.”

Shirky: He would have thought you were insane. When we lacked the ability to efficiently connect and collaborate with each other, that intrinsic motivation often didn’t surface. So we assumed that productive, public activities revolved around extrinsic motivation and external rewards. And we assumed that all rewards were substitutable for all other rewards. So I can pay you more or I can praise you or I can put a Lucite brick on your desk and it all works the same way.

Pink: Which is nonsense. Both of us cite research from University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci showing that if you give people a contingent reward—as in “if you do this, then you’ll get that”—for something they find interesting, they can become less interested in the task. When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.

Shirky: You talk about the laws of behavioral physics working differently in practice from what we believe in theory.

Pink: Yes, often these outside motivators can give us less of what we want and more of what we don’t want. Think about that study of Israeli day care centers, which we both write about. When day care centers fined parents for being late to pick up their kids, the result was that more parents ended up coming late. People no longer felt a social obligation to behave well.

Shirky: If you assume bad faith from the average participant, you’ll probably get it. In social media, the design principle that has worked remarkably well is to treat good faith as the normal case and to regard defections from that as essentially a special case to be solved.

Pink: Same goes with organizations. We don’t realize how much our unexamined assumptions take us to radically different places. If I’m running an organization and my starting premise about human beings is that people are fundamentally passive and inert, that they won’t do a damn thing unless I threaten them with a stick or entice them with a carrot, that takes me down one road. But I think that’s the wrong premise, the wrong theory of human nature.

Shirky: The power of the default setting.

Pink: I think our nature is to be active and engaged. I’ve never seen a 2-year-old or a 4-year-old who’s not active and engaged. That’s how we are out of the box. And if you begin with this presumption, you create much more open, flexible arrangements that almost inevitably lead to greater satisfaction for individuals and great innovation for organizations.

Shirky: I agree.

Pink: You say something else about organizations that I found especially compelling—about their instinct for self-perpetuation.

Shirky: Well, organizations that are founded to solve problems end up committed to the preservation of the problems. So Trentway-Wagar, an Ontario-based bus company, sues PickupPal, an online ride-sharing service, because T-W isn’t committed to solving transportation problems. It’s committed to solving transportation problems with buses. In the media world, Britannica is now committed to making reference works that can’t easily be referred to, and the music industry is now distributing music that can’t easily be shared because new ways of distributing music undermine the old business model.

Pink: Let’s go back to the cognitive surplus for a moment. What are the stakes for businesses, and what, if anything, can they do about it?

Shirky: Businesses need to recognize that this isn’t going away, that there’s a tremendous resource—the cognitive surplus of millions—being coordinated using networks. One of the things that my book is trying to do, and your book as well, is to show that there are forces at work that we often don’t see and that if organizations can tap into these forces, those organizations can actually benefit.

Pink: You haven’t had television since you were 17. How have you deployed your own cognitive surplus?

Shirky: I read. Back in the 1990s, when I was a kid with a bachelor’s degree in painting and a career in theater, I came across the Internet, which blew my mind on contact. I had 100 hours a month to surf through engineering documents, histories of the Internet, Perl manuals, mailing lists, and so on. By substituting my browser for 3rd Rock From the Sun, I was able to figure out the stuff I’ve made my living on since.

Pink: One final question, which I have to ask: What’s your favorite Gilligan’s Island episode?

Shirky: The one where they nearly get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and they don’t.

Pink: [Laughs] Mine too!

작은 회사이지만 직원들과 함께 일을 하다보면 개인의 역량에 따라 과정이나 결과가 상당히 다르다는 것을 느끼곤한다.
(회사에 중요한 것은 아이디어나 자금이 아니라 사람이라는 것에 대해서는 나중에 이야기해보기로 하자.)
내 경우에는 특이하게도 4명정도의 직원이 있던 회사의 대표에서 말단 사원의 직장인의 일을 해보았던 것이 이번 글을 쓰게 되는데 많은 도움이 되었다.
직원들에게 일을 맡기다보면 내가 지시했던 일과는 다르게 다소 엉뚱한 방향으로 나가게 되는 경우가 종종있다.
가이드라인이 없어서 그런 것일수도 있지만 내 생각인 이런 상황이 벌어지는 것은 자신이 맡은 일이 마무리를 해내는 것인지 아니면 창조를 해내는 것인지에 대해 인지를 못하고 있는 것이기 때문이라 본다.
마무리를 한다는 것이 왠지 누군가의 뒤치다꺼리를 한다는 느낌이고 잡스런 업무의 느낌이 강하지만 사실 많은 회사의 업무들은 이미 윗사람들에 의해서 아웃라인이 그려진 complete의 경우가 대부분이다. 다만 complete라하면 많은 사람들의 반응이 시원찮으니 create라는 단어를 엉뚱하게도 사용하는 것이라 생각된다. create한 인재를 원한다고는 하지만 진실로 회사에서 원하는 것은 complete를 잘하는 create한 인재가 아닐까?
나 역시도 마찬가지로 업무를 맡기면서 이미 어느정도의 아웃라인을 가지고 지시를 하는 경우가 대부분이다. 나 역시도 아쉽게도 아래로 전달될때 내 입에 의해서 "알아서 해봐"라는 식으로 바뀌게 되는 경우가 종종 있다.

Create와 Complete를 구별짓자면 내맘대로 만들기와 주어진 상황, instruction에서 마무리하기 이다.
어쩌면 Create가 complete보다 윗개념이라는 생각이 들수도 있다. 하지만 꼭 그렇지 않은 것이 상황을 마무리하는 중에 벌어지는 많은 변수들에 대해서는 얼마든지 create가 가능한 것이기 때문이다. 물론 그 create는 complete를 위해 이미 주어진 주어진 상황과 instruction scope 안에서 이루어져야 하는 것이다.
자 그럼 내가 맡은 일은 무엇인가? 그리고 지금 내가 선택할수 있는 폭은 어느정도인가?
이건 전략과 전술을 구상하는 것과도 그다지 차이가 없는것이다.

처음 마케팅을 할때 내 멘토의 주문은 "섹시한 제목을 만들어봐라"였다.
섹시한 제목이라 사람들의 관심을 이끌어 내는것?
당시엔 그저 관심만을 가져다주고 클릭을 올리는 것이라 생각했는데 그게 전혀 전부는 아니었다.
섹시한 제목이라는 것은 길거리의 매춘부를 만나는 경험이 아닌 김태희를 만나는 느낌일 것이다.
외모에 끌려서 만나봤다가 머리는 떵빈 경험을 우리는 책이나 글에서도 하고 있지 않는건 아닌가?
브랜드라는 관점에서 보았을때도 단순히 고객만을 끌어들이고 내실이 없어서 실망하고 돌아서게 하는 것은
오히려 하지 않느니만 못한 브랜딩이 된다.

끈적이는 그리고 파생의 생명력을 가진 섹시한 문장은 그저 재미난 이야기가 아니다.
하고 싶은 너저분하게 늘어놓고 싶은 이야기들을, 다듬고 짜내고 이어붙여서 만들어낸
내가 전하고 싶고 상대 이마에 딱! 붙여놓을 수 있는 것이다.

- 참고 스틱, 칩히스, 댄히스

ok캐시백 왈
보험가입을 하시는게 동의하시는건 아니고요. 그냥 안내입니다. 괜찮으니죠?

신한보험 왈
여력이 않되서 그러세요?

"네,네" 와 "않해도 되요"를 반복한 4분 08초의 통화였다.
나는 나의 ok캐시백에 입력된 정보가 신한보험에 넘겨지는 것도 싫고 보험 상담을 받기도 싫었다.
거절을 해도 해도 계속 돌려돌려 말하더니 결국은 내 정보를 넘긴 OK캐시백이나
그 전화를 받아서 보험상담을 유도하다가 결국엔 않되니 "여력이 않되서 그러세요?"라며
사람 자존심까지 긁어서 어떻게든 가입하게 만드는 신한보험이나 둘다 쓰레기다.

제발 이글 보고 반성 좀 되었으면...