Clay Burell's Library tagged sociology →  View Popular

If
I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th
century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels
would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom.
Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things
happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment,
rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who
were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society
forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage
something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

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.

Now,
this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street
corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be
careful there after dark." But it's something society knows
without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source
where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're
certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in
starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may
not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to
try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the
authorities who might have it now."

Maybe
this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of
social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't
pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that
this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's
illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone,
with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough
of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough
of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you
couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago