Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age

How can the Internet foster collective intelligence if it is simultaneously rewiring our brains to make us less intelligent? In their recent efforts to try to make sense of the cultural and political implications of today’s dramatically reconfigured media ecosystem, Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows set forth two provocative arguments that stand somewhat in opposition to one another.  Both authors have explored this terrain before—Shirky with Here Comes Everybody, his account of the various ways in which the networking power of the Internet is facilitating new modes of production and social organization; and Carr with The Big Switch, his analysis of the evolving public utility model that is increasingly characterizing access to computing power.  The two authors have engaged each other in an online debate on the Encyclopedia Britannica’s blog over whether the overall cultural effects of the Internet are positive or negative—a step forward or back for human intelligence—so it seems appropriate to consider their latest works together.

In Cognitive Surplus, Shirky revisits somewhat familiar territory (to readers of Here Comes Everybody) in his assessment of the wide ranging benefits that arise from a media environment in which the collectively available free time of the citizenry can be efficiently put to use in a variety of forms of informational and cultural production, ranging from Wikipedia to the online election of Howard Stern’s Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf as People Magazine’s Most Beautiful Person. (Shirky uses these two well-trod examples that really need to be retired as primary representations of the highs and lows of online collective activity).  As Shirky points out, a non-profit, collective enterprise like Wikipedia represents roughly one hundred million hours of human thought—in contrast to the roughly two hundred billion hours of television that Americans watch each year. 

Shirky’s point is that there is a lot of available free time that can be re-directed to more productive pursuits—pursuits that can reach even greater levels of productivity by utilizing the networking capacities of the Web to facilitate ambitious collective enterprises.  And, as Shirky’s detailed and informative overview of the psychology behind the production of user-generated content shows us, in the right context, Web users have a nearly insatiable willingness to engage in uncompensated work.  This willingness just could not be effectively tapped and coordinated until now.

Shirky acknowledges that a lot of what is produced by this cognitive surplus is of questionable quality at best.  But what he unfortunately does not address is the extent to which all of this material produced via our collective cognitive surplus may be undermining the continued viability of what we might call “professional content.”  This is an important cost-benefit calculus that Shirky largely neglects. 

For example, do the benefits of the creation of a multitude of blogs and citizen journalism enterprises in the aggregate outweigh the harms from the reduction in trained, adequately compensated journalists and editors that results? As these expressions of our collective cognitive surplus bring about more efficient means of news production, they also drain news outlets’ audiences and revenue bases.  Of course, the very phrasing of this question suggests a clear-cut dichotomy between one type of content and the other that really is not the case.  The situation is certainly far more complex than that. But it’s disappointing that Shirky did not choose to wade into it a bit more deeply.

While Shirky’s book is heavily grounded in the psychology of Internet usage, Carr’s book finds its basis in neuroscience.  Indeed, the central premise of his book is that new communications technologies have the capacity to significantly change how our brains are structured and function.  And, Carr argues, the changes that the Internet is imposing on our brains may be more negative than positive.  This argument is an expansion of Carr’s widely discussed 2008 Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?  And as is often the case when an article with such a fairly straightforward premise is expanded to book length (see, e.g., Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and Bob Garfield’s The Chaos Scenario), the reader gets a sense that there is perhaps a bit more padding here than is necessary. 

Regardless, Carr brings a compelling amount of scientific evidence to bear on his thesis that the nature of interacting with and via the Internet is undermining our ability to concentrate on individual tasks for long periods of time, to retain certain types of important information, and to engage in the kind of deep, sustained thought that is fundamental to accomplishing certain types of tasks.

In the end, if we accept the premises of both books at face value and try to connect the dots between them, we are then confronted with a scenario in which the online environment is allowing legions of people to become more active participants in the production of news, information, and culture, though these legions of content producers are significantly lacking in many of the cognitive attributes necessary for producing some of the forms of content that are important to a vibrant culture and a well-functioning democracy. 

And, as was noted above, any such developments really do need to be taken into consideration alongside what is happening to our traditional “professional” producers of news, information, and culture.  These days, any wringing of hands about the demise of such professionals smacks of elitism at an historical moment when a pronounced strain of anti-elitism has affected everything from politics to journalism to cultural production. If we’re really to understand whether our changing media ecosystem benefits both American democracy and culture, we need to understand the full range of costs and benefits.