Input Junkie - April 27th, 2008
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11:26 am
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Cognitive Surplus
http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
....
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.
....
I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
Link thanks to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) andrewducker.
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08:04 pm
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OSBP, some thoughts and links
A very short version: theferrett, a well-known lj writer, wrote a piece about making it easier to ask permission to touch breasts. This experiment was tried on a smallish scale at a couple of science fiction conventions, and he wrote about it as a utopian experience, probably worth repeating.
All hell broke loose, or at least what looks like several novels-worth of lj posts in a few days.
The original post:
http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1087686.html#cutid1
Things theferrett said about the original post:
http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1087686.html
Some sensible discussion at theferret's lj:
http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1088047.html?view=55185967#t55185967
Consent wasn't always as cleanly handled as the original post said:
http://novapsyche.livejournal.com/1996568.html
There were a lot of very angry people. I think a lot of it was background rage at sexual harassment and worse at conventions-- it's just that no one had written a giddy essay praising something that was probably ok for most of the people involved but which had a potential to go extremely bad.
Slogan list/rage compendium:
http://the-red-shoes.livejournal.com/1265051.html?nc=135
More rage:
http://misia.livejournal.com/1055120.html
The Open Source Back Women Up Project:
http://vito-excalibur.livejournal.com/173664.html
To my mind, the best thing to come out of all this is more awareness that a lot of women are sexually harassed at conventions, and this is a serious and I hope correctable problem.
Brilliant essay:
http://synecdochic.livejournal.com/213567.html
The distinction between sex positive and getting laid positive is excellent, and there's a good discussion of background levels of fear in the comment thread.
One thing I noticed is that people frequently made the mistake of collapsing permission to ask to touch breasts into permission to touch breasts. It's easy to say that people shouldn't be so stupid, but I prefer the approach of trying to figure out the roots of common mistakes, and I'm not sure what's going on with that one. Unfortunately, I've returned The Body Has a Mind of Its Own (about how the brain maps the body-- it's much more complicated than those sensory and motor homuncula), but iirc there are some words like 'lick' that activate the brain as though the action were actually being done. In any case, if that mistake was so easy for bright people who weren't there (and therefore weren't caught up in the moment), it underlines the risks of things going wrong.
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