Motivation and Cognitive Surplus, Part ii

Back to our regularly scheduled programming:

And in June, [Clay] 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...And these efforts aren’t fueled by external rewards but by intrinsic motivation—the joy of doing something for its own sake.

This Drives me Nuts, Part II: what are these "powerful forms of online political action"? I suppose the most popular bit is Twitter, the instant, if often nonsensical and contradictory, reports from on the ground. But what I see more of is the emergence of the meme that People are Useful, i.e. socializing as networking, friends as encompassing a broad degree of relatedness from your best friend to the guy you met once at a conference that you don't quite know well enough to add to your LinkedIn contacts.

Perhaps more pervasive is this notion that we're supposed to learning all the time, and leisure time as pure leisure no longer exists for anyone who is not a sloth. Besides, who says I don't engage with the TV? Why, I was screaming at the Celtics when the Lakers whupped them good just the other day.

More precisely, what does Shirky mean by engagement in this context? Sending an asynchronous text message is still like sending a letter, albeit attached to a jet rocket. The recipient can answer at her leisure, or not answer at all. Engaging in a affinity group forum online is essentially the same. Even if you are live chatting, you can get disconnected abruptly, or just hang up with few repercussions.

And who's to say that all this engagement is more than discussing the results of American Idol? It's unpopular but important to point out that more talk doesn't necessary equal more wisdom. In fact, it very often doesn't.