Nobody can deny that Clay Shirky is a clever guy, and that he knows his beans when it comes to the world of social software.1 Part of his argument is that a) television has been masking the sheer amount of leisure time that we have to participate in communal activities, and b) the information revolution has provided us with the internet as a vehicle to make that leisure time more productive. This hypothesis of cognitive surplus seems reasonable, although one can argue with his assertion that making lolcatz is better than doing nothing, on the grounds that making lolcatz is at least doing something.
The exact means by which the internet enables us to capitalise on this surplus vary, but a lot of emphasis is placed on social software of various kinds – Web 2.0, as it’s sometimes known. In the last couple of weeks we’ve had some discussion about one general application – the possibility of humanitarian wikis, and the potential of crowdsourcing, the ne plus ultra of Web 2.0 – but throughout these discussions I’ve played the role of the sceptic. Shirky’s essay provides me with a starting point to address the most basic concern that I have about the role of crowdsourcing and other approaches in the humanitarian community.
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 even five years ago.
This raises a problem which I think is often overlooked in our predictions about how these tools might change the sector. Humanitarian workers, generally speaking, don’t have a whole lot of cognitive surplus. If you’ve ever worked in disaster response – even on the periphery – you know that the working day can sometimes last literally the entire day. Even when you’re not working, you’re working, because you’re still in the crisis area and you’re essentially on call if something goes wrong (especially in areas which are insecure). Your cognitive surplus will not be focused on your humanitarian work; and even if you are inclined to contribute to a humanitarian wikipedia (for example), you are very likely be in a tiny minority.
It seems to me that this poses a serious problem for those expecting aid workers to be engaged participants in experimenting with these new technologies. It seems that this basic obstacle undermines many of the claims about how the humanitarian community might use these tools, although this doesn’t mean that those technologies have no future and it definitely doesn’t mean that we won’t be affected by their spread, especially as the web becomes increasingly mobile.
- If you haven’t read Here Comes Everybody yet, please do so, and enjoy listening to this extended interview which riffs on many of the economic arguments in that book. [↩]