From an Attention Crash to a “Cognitive Surplus”

Posted May 29th, 2008 by Brian Cavoli

There’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere recently that we are risking an attention crash with all the demands and pressures of an always-on social media world.

On Micropersuasion.com, Steve Rubel writes:

“By 2009, the Radicati Group predicts that we’ll spend 41% of our time managing email. Now add to that the IMs, documents, Facebook pokes, RSS feeds, Twitter tweets and text messages coming at us and we’re officially way oversubscribed. Unfortunately, the problem will not abate. Human attention is finite. It doesn’t scale. Worse, the pace of change today is so rapid there’s a huge need to stay digitally savvy.”

He’s right. What balance I once had has now been ruined with my new found love for Twitter.

Clay Shirky, NYU professior and author of the new book “Here Comes Everybody” offers another perspective. In this presentation from last month’s Web 2.0 conference, Clay makes the case that Americans actually have a tremendous “cognitive surplus” from hours of TV viewing that can be applied to participation activities online.

To illustrate the scale of this surplus, Clay estimates that the entirety of Wikipedia represents about 100 million hours of human thought. That my sound staggering until you realize that Americans spend about that much time every weekend just watching TV ads. According to Clay, the 200 billion hours that Americans spend watching television each year represents about 2,000 Wikipedia projects. That is per year.

Nobody is implying that behavior will shift that dramatically, but just a 1% shift of American’s time from TV to participation online would amount to 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

So while the social media savvy may feel over saturated with information, we have to remember that a majority of the population still haven’t joined the party.

Here’s the video of the presentation. Also, the full text transcription is on his blog.

Entry Filed under: Digital Content, User-Generated Content