When discussing the connectivity and overall power of Web 2.0, it’s hard for internet evangelists to refrain from getting a little starry-eyed and at some points downright hyperbolic. We are young Clark Kents watching the Fortress of Solitude rise quickly around us, amazed at how the mammoth structure connects and solidifies in mere seconds.
Perhaps this is why we gathered around the intertubes to watch Clay Shirky’s speech on harnessing the collective power of Web 2.0. It’s because he so eloquently patted us on the backs and told us bloggers, Wikipedians, and twitterers to Go Forth! Speak! Change the World! We nodded our heads, as we so often do, at the assertion that until only recently media was a very passive entertainment. This old form of media did much to amuse but little to quench our desires to build.
As is often the case, tech writer Nicholas Carr has burst our bubble. In a post titled “Gilligan’s web,” he attacks what he calls Shirky’s “liberation mythology” by addressing the very anecdote that Shirky used to illustrate his point: Gilligan’s Island.
To recap, Shirky spent a good deal of time in his speech talking about his (wasted) days sitting on his couch and watching the shipwrecked group try and fail to get off the island over and over again. This time spent watching, he implied, was utterly unproductive and at the end of the day he had nothing to show for it.
But as Carr documents, Gilligan’s Island, the very show used to epitomize old media, has become a plentiful destination in Wikipedialand, the very kind of media that Shirky is deifying:
Not only is there an entry for the show itself, but there are separate articles for each of the castaways - Gilligan, the Skipper, the Professor, Mary Ann, Ginger, Thurston Howell III, and Eunice “Lovey” Howell - as well as the actors that played the roles, the ill-fated SS Minnow, and even the subsequent TV movies that were based on the show, including the 1981 classic The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island. Best of all is the annotated list of all 98 of the episodes in the series, which includes a color-coded guide to “visitors, animals, dreams, and bamboo inventions.”
But this is only a lead-in, Carr’s own anti-anecdote. He uses it to “underscore the symbiosis between the pop-culture artifacts of the mass media and so much of the user-generated content found online.”
Shirky’s main problem, Carr posits, is that he makes it seem that before the advent of the web, we were slack-jawed television addicts, unable to take our “cognitive surplus” and put it to good use. That’s just plain hogwash.
The nerds among us were certainly busy. In sixth grade, for instance, I didn’t even have an email address. Instead, a group of my friends got together and formed a “publishing company” called Strange Comix. We each had our own comical superheros, our crude drawings, and our pulpy plots. We took these and shared and collaborated and produced dozens of stapled-together comic books.
Other people got together and produced demo tapes of their bands, or shot short films using hand-held cams, or formed book clubs and discussed their favorite literature.
Yes, the web provided an avenue to amplify all this — those short films became youtube videos and those book clubs became lit bloggers — but the cognitive surplus was certainly already there.
So what does this mean? In some ways, it indicates that the web might make us less active. Take the book blog, with its open comments section and opportunities for discussion about literature. Could a hearty debate in a comments thread ever come close to the real-world discussion you’d find in a book club? By being glued to our computers and inputing all our “cognitive surplus” into the web, is it sucking up the cognitive surplus that might go into painting murals or practicing with your band? Do the online donations you make to Barack Obama even compare to putting on your shoes and going door to door to tout his message?
Maybe, maybe not. All I can say is, the half hour I spent writing this post has kept me away from my daily workout. I will pay for my Web 2.0 evangelizing with my flabby thighs, and perhaps my poorer health isn’t necessarily worth the creation you’re reading before you right now.
