Cognitive Surplus and Creativity
Television programs like Batman, Bewitched, and Love Boat initiate smiles and shared recollections for some individuals raised during the 1960s and 1970s. Kids sitting in front of the television every day after school, and with the rest of the family in the evenings, defined an entire generation.
Yet those same individuals today, now parents, decry their own kids’ preoccupations for Facebook, and other social media.
Clay Shirky, author of “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age,” makes a case for digital media. As someone born during the 1960s and also part of the television generation, Shirky argues that social media and networking are more engaging, less about consuming, and less isolating than hours spent watching TV.
In an interview with Wired Magazine, Shirky said that someone born during the 1960s has watched approximately 50,000 hours of television. That’s more than a solid five and half years.
Time in front of the TV, or what society categorizes as a way to pass idle time, turns individuals away from others, from important social connections, from creating and doing activities that give them personal satisfaction. Take all those wasted hours and flip them into hours spent with media that’s more about creating, networking, and learning, and suddenly precious minutes become a social resource, according to Shirky.
The hours once spent in front of the television but now spent in other more engaging (online) activities are what Shirky terms “cognitive surplus.”
So what do individuals create with this cognitive surplus? In the Wired interview, Shirky states that sometimes it involves creating captions for funny cat pictures, (lolcats) to creating whole social movements, or getting involved with human rights issues.
Simply consider the popularity of sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook, and the potential for how individuals apply their creativity in an online format starts to make sense.
But does interacting with social media have a lasting, beneficial effect on how the human brain thinks and functions, and how individuals behave?
Shirky suggests that this online activity is beneficial for individuals, and entire societies. He is not a psychologist, but a professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. His main area of research is on how the Internet affects society – socially and economically.
But his hypothesis is relevant for psychologists as well, and an area of exploding research. Those in fields such as the psychology of creativity, cognitive psychology, social psychology, media psychology, and educational psychology are all actively researching this topic.
If you are interested in how social media affects individuals and society, consider pursuing a degree in one of these fields. Contact schools for more information on a bachelor’s, master’s or PhD in psychology.