Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink have led eerily parallel lives. Both grew up in Midwest university towns in the 1970s, where they spent their formative years watching television after school and at night. Both later went to Yale (a BA in painting for Shirky, a law degree for Pink). And both eventually abandoned their chosen fields to write about technology, business, and society.
Now their paths are intersecting. In December, Pink, a Wired contributing editor, came out with “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us." The book digs through more than five decades of behavioral science to challenge the orthodoxy that carrots and sticks are the most effective ways to motivate workers in the 21st century. Instead, he argues, the most enduring motivations aren't external but internal things we do for our own satisfaction.
And in June, Shirky is publishing “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age," which mines adjacent territory. He argues that the time Americans once spent watching television has been redirected toward activities that are less about consuming and more about engaging from Flickr and Facebook to powerful forms of online political action. (For an alternate perspective on the influence of the Internet, see Nicholas Carr's essay) And these efforts aren't fueled by external rewards but by intrinsic motivation--the joy of doing something for its own sake.
Wired had the two sit down for a conversation about motivation and media, social networking, sitcoms, and why the hell people spend their free time editing Wikipedia.
Pink: A few days ago, I was talking with someone about Wikipedia. And the guy shook his head dismissively and said about the people who contribute to it: Where do they get the time? We both think thats a silly question.
Shirky: It is. People have had lots of free time for as long as there's been the industrialized world. But that free time has mainly been something to be used up rather than used, especially in postwar America, with the rise of suburbanization and long commutes. Suddenly we no longer lived in tight-knit communities and therefore we spent less time interacting face-to-face. As a result, we ended up spending the bulk of our free time watching television.
Pink: The numbers on that are astonishing.
Shirky: Staggering. Someone born in 1960 has watched something like 50,000 hours of television already. Fifty thousand hours--more than five and a half solid years.
Pink: You've just described our boyhoods.
Shirky: Yes, sitting in front of the television.
Pink: Passively watching “Gilligan's Island" and “The Partridge Family."
Shirky: Oh, that walk down memory lane is painful. Somehow, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. But once we stop thinking of all that time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the worlds educated population maybe a trillion hours per yearis a new resource. Its what I refer to as the cognitive surplus.
Pink: A surplus that post-TV mediablogs, wikis, and Twittercan tap for other, often more valuable, uses.
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