Jed의 소개로 알게된 두사람, 그리고 책
진정으로 내가 원하고, 내가 가져야할 idea와 talent를 알게된듯하다.
일면으로는 congnitive surplus가 다이프로에 적용되었던 것이라 생각이 들지만
다시금 그것을을 이뤄낼 방법에 대해서 상당히 접근이 어려웠었는데 좀 더 이론화하여 정리할수 있는 기회이다.
non-profit 의 성공에 대해 불확실함을 이야기하는 사람들의 저변에는 물질주의에 기반한 가치교환이 깔려있다.
즉 보상이라는 개념이 금전적인 가치의 교환만으로 이뤄진다는 전제가 깔리다보니 당췌 non-profit의 개념이 연결이 될수가 없는것이다. 국내에서도 점점 더 마케팅에서의 가치교환도 value change 개념에서 보고 있으니 이 역시도 점점 더 나아지는 할 것으로 보이지만 그 basement가 금전적 개념(단순히 돈이라 하지않는 것은 금전으로 환산된 노동가치의 교환같은 경우도 마찬가지이기 때문이다.)에 뿌리를 두다보니 영 쉽게 개선될거란 생각이 들지를 않는다.
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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.
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!
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