Big thinking critical technology theory, yep, that’s what it takes to shake Keepfaking it from its slumber. Well that’s what we’re looking for in life and we’ve found plenty of it at Clay Shirky’s shirky.com.

But before we get into the heavy stuff, what is it with Gilligan’s Island? Talk TV studies to an American and it’s the most discussed program of the 60’s. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an entire episode. Sure I grew up on the wrong side of the Atlantic but I thought TV entertainment was a common language. The Cosby Show, Seasame Street, Bewitched, all shows that spoke the common language of TV-Land-eese. Gilligan’s Island, a foreign tongue if ever there was one.

But back to the theory. Shirky writes in-depth and rather cohesively about the concept of social surplus. Social surplus is the time people like us are clawing back from TV networks by creating internet content instead watching two minutes of Madison Avenue four to six times an hour.

The rise of the web, the blogsphere, social networks and most probably LOLCats means that this decade is the first in which we’ve started turning our eyes increasingly away from the TV and onto something different. Note, I certainly don’t think these new endevours are necessarily any more worthy. But Shirky does. Hence, coupled to Shirky’s social surplus is the notion of the heat sink:

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. This cognitive heat is now being directed elsewhere.

Let’s take that at face value. If we weren’t all stuck indoors watching plasticly enhanced actors living outrageous fantasies we’d all be doing something more worthwhile. Maybe we would.

Shirky then goes on to look more closely at the relationship between heat sinks and social surplus but I want for a second to dwell on the heat sinks. What else in society is a heat sink? Religion? Professional sport? Are these institutions sucking in society’s intelligence and thought time without reward? Probably, but so what if they are. Well, let’s go back and look at what’s happening to TV.

Traditional TV is imploding. A one to many broadcast model simply won’t work and the distribution model gets more and more confusing every year. One only has to examine the perilous state that ITV and Channel 4 are in right now to confirm this.

Organized religion in Europe is in exactly the same state. Turning up to church at an appointed hour weekly is a game more and more punters are unwilling to play. And how about pro sport? Well that’s a trickier one. Despite more money than ever going into Premier League football, average gates year on year are dropping. So maybe these heat sinks are cooling down and drawing less of the social surplus they once were.

So what does all this mean, for TV, religion and sport. Back to Shirky:

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

So Mr. CBS/Viacom/CNN/Sky/ManchesterUnited/RomanCatholicChurch, it’s easy, let us produce and create and share with you. Give us the content, some safety scissors and glue and we’ll go to town on the catechisms.

Again though I’m not so sure. Sharing for sharing’s sake. Are we merely dreaming of Life 2.0. a dangerous principle:

It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation.

Just why is the creation of badly photoshopped kittens a more valid use of brain space than taking in a dose of Desperate Housewives?

My thoughts:

Is this new creation on the internet actually good for anything? look at all the erroneous Wikipedia entries. Most of the content on PhotoBucket is rubbish. When did YouTube actually do anything for humanity?

Sure we have to find out where the users have been locked out of participation with big media/sport/religion. But “if we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?”

Ultimately we’re going to have to get the carving knives out, just let’s not fool ourselves that we’re creating a better, more cerebral society merely by letting the users play with the product.

No meta data. No way of knowing who’s read a journal or paper before. Of knowing what they thought of it. At least unless you’re the librarian or have one of those special CIA computers that track books on particular subject matter like “The Idiots Guide to making Nuclear Fission in your living room”.

Ok, it’s too late on a Sunday night to go into this in depth, but the last post has me thinking of how we use libraries, or rather why I don’t. Why can’t I go down to Whitechapel public library and have the same experience I can have looking up a book on Amazon. Why can’t I have a better experience, after all, the public library doesn’t have the same commercial agenda as a publicly listed company. And an academic library is actually there to promote and encourage the transformation of information stored in books, to useable knowledge in someone’s head.

So why isn’t there a way to capture a reader’s thoughts as they’re reading or browsing. And of displaying this to the next 12 year old looking for Deathly Hallows. Or computational chemist looking for some shit hot molecular vibration modeling information. Libraries have to start organizing information differently. Turn the card files into networks. Two way networks and allow us to rank and annotate them. And communicate through them.

There was a time music was accessed by artist name, album name or song title only. Didn’t matter if that was online or in Virgin Megastore. MySpace changed that. Now we find new music through networks. There’s a lesson and a model there for our libraries.

David Weinberger’s “Everything Is Miscellaneous” dealt well with why this information is needed. Now we need an altruistic version of Mark Zuckerberg to build an Open Source network for Libraries worldwide to hook up to.

First off a full disclosure: I read John Naughton’s “The Networker” column in today’s Observer on printed news sheet version I bought from Hackney Road’s best minimarket, Ince. I’m sure Gutenberg would be delighted by that, as no doubt Mr. Ince was when I handed over my £1.90. A lot of money for something I’ve gone and re-read online for free. I think by admitting that I’m removing myself from the demographic this post is all about but such is life.

A couple of thoughts on Naughtons words, or more to the point, the study by the British Library and UCL on the information-seeking habits of young people he refers to. The report says amongst lots of other interesting things that we are spending as much time searching for information as consuming it. It also states that we’re not spending much time on the media once we find it. We read, then move on to the next object on the same horizontal plane.

What does this mean? It means two things: first Google, Amazon and iTunes have a ways to go in terms of getting us media easier and quicker. There’s a debate swirling at the moment about human search and what it has to offer a world in which Google are paying all the best engineers to make sure their algorithm stays in first place. Of course that assumes that finding the information is the end goal. Sometimes the search is as entertaining as the media at the end.

Take Twitter, it could be said that the micro blogging application/universe is really a passive search tool. I connect/follow all those I think will point me to useful data and hey presto, I get pointed to media I invariably find interesting. This is a form of human search. And because of the social nature of the search I enjoy the process as much, if not more than the end result. Marshall would be proud, in this case the medium really can be the message.

Second, isn’t this method of consumption very much like the way we use some social networks, and I’m thinking MySpace in particular. We connect, consume media that our new friend has posted, then move on. All the time we’re at the same rung of the hierarchical ladder.

Over the past 12 months many have looked at News Corps purchase of MySpace and wondered if maybe Rupert Murdoch in his senior years had shot his wad on Tom co. Facebook was the cool new thing led by a twenty-something year old with the best PR since Mother Theresa. But the Facebook fanboys have been quiet of late. MySpace has been getting some spring cleaning and the media-model it’s build on is looking sound enough.

So what does that add up to? Well at the end of their report the British Library team come to some conclusions. They say the days of paid-for library searches, additional pins and passwords to get into bespoke cataloguing software, and separate, non-connected databases for online and offline information are over. Users just couldn’t be bothered. Users want a one stop shop. Users want to use their Google toolbar. If libraries want to remain relevant they’re going to have to open up and let Google, MySpace or whoever it may be in.

Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer have put together an interesting collaborative media review tool over the past few days. It’s worth checking out at http://twitcrit.scripting.com/changes.html.

The technology is simple. Get a Twitter account, track down and start following @twitcrit, then message @twitcrit with any media review that takes your fancy. So far so easy if you can script and rummage around an api. But let’s step back from Jarvis’ critique of the latest Democratic prez debate (hey Jeff, why all the hating on you boy Barack?) and look at what this approach does to media interaction.

The wonderful thing about Twitter is that it is a nice simple lightweight medium for one to many broadcasting. Using a browser, a desktop app or a normal SMS from a phone, anyone can send 160 characters of  love, hate or debate to those that “follow” their tweets. There’s no walled gardens (Facebook etc.) which means the user can get information in and and out of Twitter with the minimum of fuss.

Up until now Twitter has been great in situations such as conferences, where, for a short period of time only, people need a one-to-many communication structure.  It also did a job during recent Californian fires. But all of these uses have been somewhat simplistic. There’s not a lot done with the data on either side of the transport. Message is entered into Twitter, Twitter sends it on it’s merry way, tweet is read at the other end. Bosh!

But how about we start some smart aggregation as Jarvis is suggesting. How about instead of treating each tweet as an isolated many-to-one message, we aggregate it with other likeminded tweets so that we have many many-to-one tweets all sorted and bunched on the receive side. We then start building a picture of what the crowd is thinking on any particular subject, and importantly (as this really comes into its own in live situations) we get a picture of how the crowd’s collective mind is changing as the debate/show/movie/game is progressing.

So how’s this different from those calls to action for standard text messages during X-Factor and the like? Twitter is the difference here. All of this messaging takes place within a defined (but relatively open) infrastructure. We can follow our tweets. We can reply to others and we can interact on a plethora of devices in different ways.

Two applications immediately jump to mind. Elections. Live sport. Howard Dean and the rise of the A-List blogger made blogging the big story of 2004. Can Twitter have an impact this time around?

As for sport, we have a bit longer to think about that, but at the very least a live play-by-play of the Super Bowl, or the multimillion dollar 30 second spots that surround it is a goer in a few weeks.

Now, one final issue. What and how does big media get a piece of this action?

From Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture:

The specific content of gossip is often less important than the social ties created through the exchange of secrets between participants - and for that reason, the social functions of gossip hold when dealing with television content. It isn’t who you are talking about but who you are talking with that matters. Gossip builds common ground between participants, as those who exchange information assure one another of what they share. Gossip is finally a way of talking about yourself through critiquing the actions and values of others. As cyberspace broadens the sphere of our social interactions, it becomes even more important to be able to talk about peope we share in common via the media than people from our local community who will not be known by all of the participants in an online conversation. Into that space step the complex, often contradictory figures who appear on reality television.

Jenkins mentions this in relation to building community around reality TV. But really this applicable to all relationships and Jenkins brings it up after a discussion on building brand champions/agitators in the community.
So the questions arises, how can brands and media owners facilitate this gossip? Is this where they interact with the social networks or should they even be trying to own this or merely interact with it.

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