bradandgeo: 'cognitive surplus' and the church...

'cognitive surplus' and the church...

4 Comments Published by bradandgeo on Saturday, August 30, 2008 at 07:19.

Really intriguing talk by Clay Shirky at a recent Web 2.0 Expo (you have to scroll down halfway through the page to get to the actual video and text of the talk). His basic argument is that we in the West have been in a collective stupor the past 50 odd years where we've spent all of our free time watching TV. But people are beginning to wake up from this, and they are finding what Shirky calls a 'cognitive surplus' - creative energy that can be put to good use. He makes the case that Wikipedia is a step in this direction. Excerpt:

If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 98 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of the cognitive surplus that's finally being dragged into what Tim O'Reilly calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first... Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

I wonder if there isn't something similar happening in the church. For a good while now churches have been seen as religious vendors, giving people what they need spiritually, offering a form of entertainment that can be taken in passively, etc. But there are quite a few people that are realising that this has led to a sort of collective spiritual stupor. And when people come out of this stupor, what you find is people not wanting a passive, received religion, but a spirituality that they are a part of, or as the article says, an 'architecture of participation'. And this is ironic because this is exactly the same shift that needed to happen 2000 years ago - the shift from one priest to the 'priesthood of all believers'; the shift from a few select leaders to a plurality of 'gifts' making up the body as a whole.

But, as the article also notes, these times of change aren't always straightforward. And I think we're seeing that in the church at large as well. We've so invested in a certain system, that we're not quite sure what any other system might look like. So the good news is that we all might get to be a part of something new. The bad news is that it might be a little messy. (And to be honest, in general I'm not a big fan of messy.)

4 Responses to “'cognitive surplus' and the church...”

# andrea 7:37 AM

(came here via a @timoreilly tweet.)

Interesting post. I very much enjoy Clay Shirky's observations, and am also seeing changes in the church. But I'm not sure I'm making the exact same connection you are, (but maybe a related one?)

At least in the states, churches have long invited participation in a certain sense, but maybe the most prominant ways have been prescribed, and we are feeling more comfortable crawling out from the more dominant ways to express our faith.

So if pressed to compare a web 2.0-ish influence on the church, I'd select the Long Tail; and the related "Find the Others." That those of us with marginalized beliefs, even within a larger belief system, feel less alone, and more able to find like-minded souls.

Also: thanks for the link to Emergent Village on your sidebar. I hadn't known about it. What an eclectic mix of topics!
# bradandgeo 9:33 AM

andrea, thanks for the comment. your idea is spot on...
# cwroblew 9:26 PM

(also came here via a @timoreilly tweet.)

I also found this an interesting concept. I feel that your thoughts need a bit more development.

The church I attend is in the process of entering the 21st century. We use the web in an online forum to communicate with each other beyond the church services. This allows us to ask more questions and give our own views as well as learn from others. The Senior Elder posts a question before the next service which prepares us for the service. Unfortunately that leaves some behind since they do not have internet access.
# Anonymous 1:02 AM

This makes me think of my own parallel experiences with Tibetan Buddhism, which tends to be very authoritarian.

It is easy to see religion as a form of entertainment. (Wanna see the Dalai Lama? Buy a ticket at Ticketron.) The trouble is, it's not usually very entertaining, especually when you look at the competition.

We could also see religion as a kind of voluntary tax (mandatory in parts of Europe), or even as a "protection racket" (accept Jesus, avoid hell). But these would hardly motivate people to take their religion to heart.

Pascal Boyer describes the big religions as guilds, whose purpose is to help the professionals make a living, and limit competition. Maybe the guilds are starting to break down, though some of them look pretty resiliant.