The growth and spread of fan fiction is a way for the fans to participate directly in, say, the Harry Potter universe or the Tolkien universe. You see something that wasn’t possible even ten years ago, both because the technologies are in place but also, much more importantly, because now these tools reach most of society. Right, it’s not just when a tool comes along that change happens. It’s really when it becomes ubiquitous and even boring. And what’s happened now is that the Web has gotten boring for a whole generation of teens and twenty-somethings. And so, because they can take it for granted, they’re using this platform to add interactivity around regular media consumption.
RJ: Do you see a shift going on in terms of attention or attention span? Are people bouncing around between these things—you know, they watch the show and they want to blog about it and then they want to be part of the community? Or are all the complaints about attention span just kind of wild?
CS: You know, there’ve always been these complaints about attention span. And, again, this is one of the things that’s—people just worry about attention span and they change the media they worry about. I mean, when I was growing up, the attention span worry was, you know, entirely targeted at television shows and so forth. And, one of the things I think Steven Johnson does quite beautifully in Everything Bad is Good for You is to note the ways in which the unit of a television show moved from being inside the show—you have Fantasy Island or Love Boat, which has sort of two or three subplots—to being units of comprehension that passed across several shows. So, you get the Sopranos, where the entire thing has a narrative arc that spans years. So, it’s harder, I think, to make the case that attention span is unilaterally shortening.
What is quite obviously happening is that the number of things that are available for short attention are increasing. But, so is the ability to consume complicated, long-form information. I think the fact that Nate Silver’s site in the recent election—Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com—became a breakout hit was a kind of a testimony to a hunger in people for taking in information in long, large, complex ways. It was just a crazy amount of information that Silver followed. One of the things the Internet does by removing the old constraints—it’s really the first thing ever invented worthy of the name media, because it’s the first general purpose media we’ve ever had—is it almost never moves us from a world of one effect to another effect. It almost always increases the range of all effects. So, I think that, you know, it’s certainly been a boon for, you know, short-form blogging and Twittering and so forth. But, it also means that someone who’s especially interested in a certain kind of content can actually get much, much more access to it than possible.
So, I think it has increased long attention span where that is what people find rewarding and increased short attention span where that’s been found rewarding. My seven-year-old, who is absolutely obsessed with every aspect of the New York transportation system, has found on Wikipedia more information than his parents who have lived in New York for twenty and forty years, respectively, could possibly have provided him. And, he’s just happy to be on Wikipedia, pulling this information down and adding it up. And there’s so much reward there for long attention spans and I think we haven’t noticed it in part because the narrative that we tell ourselves about media is ‘the past is always better than the future,’ that we kind of missed the fact that, actually, the range of effects is opening up.
RJ: Would you say that the main effect of the Internet or the Web on media consumption is that it has facilitated a wider range of accessibility from the really short-term to the really long-term to the really in-depth—
Clay, you are one of the smartest thinkers on the web right now. I just taught a class on blogging and social media at the Academy of Art University and you are dead right, 20 somethings are not up to speed on technology at all. Right now I work for a pretty big enterprise and I think one of the biggest opportunities right now is helping big organizations adopt some of the practices that are creating the most value on the web. Unfortunately enterprises are also distracted by the noise of social networks etc. and the next bright shiny noisy object, and it is obscuring the really powerful ways to create value on the web and capitalize on this cognitive surplus.
I'm currently writing a blog post called "The future of business is to create products and services that people can believe in & provide ways for people to take responsibility help" and will be posting to http://experiencecurve.com soon :-)
Posted by Karl Long on Fri 19 Dec 2008 at 05:28 PM
Awesome interview. I cannot wait for round 2!
-Robert
Founder Metaprinter.com
Posted by Robert Ivan on Fri 19 Dec 2008 at 08:48 PM
Excellent interview. I do have a quibble though, on the subject of information overload. Certainly the view that you demolish in the interview is the cranky, un-reflective one that argues that something is valuable only because it is rare, and thus somehow that knowledge has become almost banal in its ubiquity it is devalued. It was just to dismiss that view for basically the reasons you assigned. However, this is not the only problem that large quantities of information can cause.
To utilize the Library at Alexandria example for a second, the more pertinent problem of information overload has to do with how it is arranged and structured. Imagine a library which has no card catalog and is so vast that it is nearly impossible to find the text that answers your inquiry in any reasonable amount of time. Current technical solutions to this problem online, such as Google and other search engines, are metaphorically equivalent to hiring some folks, and handing them each a slip of paper with some words that you think might be in the title of the text, and then sending them throughout the library hoping that one of them will happen upon it. As the sheer quantity of information increases, more texts unrelated to the goal of the inquiry will be found given the same search parameters.
Posted by Elemenope on Sat 20 Dec 2008 at 06:03 PM
Excellent interview. I do have a quibble though, on the subject of information overload. Certainly the view that you demolish in the interview is the cranky, un-reflective one that argues that something is valuable only because it is rare, and thus somehow that knowledge has become almost banal in its ubiquity it is devalued. It was just to dismiss that view for basically the reasons you assigned. However, this is not the only problem that large quantities of information can cause.
To utilize the Library at Alexandria example for a second, the more pertinent problem of information overload has to do with how it is arranged and structured. Imagine a library which has no card catalog and is so vast that it is nearly impossible to find the text that answers your inquiry in any reasonable amount of time. Current technical solutions to this problem online, such as Google and other search engines, are metaphorically equivalent to hiring some folks, and handing them each a slip of paper with some words that you think might be in the title of the text, and then sending them throughout the library hoping that one of them will happen upon it. They each bring back a stack of texts that might have what you are looking for, and then it is left to you to sort through the resulting piles. As the sheer quantity of information increases, more texts unrelated to the goal of the inquiry will be found given the same search parameters. Soon, the piles would become unmanageable.
Since it is primarily a technical problem with the overall structure of the information ecology, it really does not indicate any normative judgment the way that so-called Luddites and other nay-sayers would like it to. Still, the problem is food for thought because, absent a breakthrough, the increasing failure of existing tools to find information online, the Internet stands to become a great deal less useful than we are used to it being.
Posted by Elemenope on Sat 20 Dec 2008 at 06:07 PM
Suffice it to say, if you provide a blank wall and marker pens, people will scribble. What's written will reflect the reader's visceral response.
At least Monty Python had it right in the film Life of Brian when the centurion forced Brian to write in Latin "Romans go home" after a brutal course in grammar. Still, all Brian did was to write it 100 times correctly but without providing any insight.
Posted by sylvie chen on Sat 20 Dec 2008 at 08:50 PM
Jesus Christos!...this is one of the most wonderfully written, articulate, entertaining post on a serious subject I've read in my lifetime...thank you so much for a wonderful read Clay...I'll send it to all my friends...Carl Muecke
Posted by wagonjak on Sat 20 Dec 2008 at 09:02 PM
A wonderful interview. I hope the second part takes up the question of how information is--or is not--vetted.
Posted by Eric L. on Sun 21 Dec 2008 at 01:25 PM
Clay: a filtering/sifting/organizing technology to watch is being developed at Fluidinfo.com. Check out Scoble's video interview with the founder.
Posted by Mayson Lancaster on Sun 21 Dec 2008 at 05:53 PM
How fascinating. I never thought of it in these terms before, but I so agree - I spend a lot of time reading and writing on the web. I read newspaper articles online, I read about thirty blogs: great, intelligent, thought out blogs. I'm writing daily on my own blog, and commenting on others.
And why shouldn't we have information overload? Why shouldn't we dive in, use our resources, learn more, do more?
Posted by Lindsay Price on Mon 22 Dec 2008 at 09:47 AM
Clay, I have to say the more I watch you speak, and read your interviews etc, the more I regret having passed on attending NYU's ITP program. However, I'm very happy where I am now and to have stumbled on your insights.
As a marketer, the speed at which many people in our industry move doesn't allow them to understand to take a step back and think about interactive the way you have outlined above.
Also I think there's a big tendency to over-think, over-engineer in a world where that doesn't often matter and many of the generation you describe are unfamiliar.
Posted by Akash on Mon 22 Dec 2008 at 03:36 PM
Clay, thanks for your insights..and as always, brilliant. On the subject of 20somethings and their non-understanding of technologies...the interesting thing here however is that while the average 20something may not understand the technologies themselves (indeed, most friends outside of my industry have no idea what this "data portability" is that I continuously blog about), they do not need to.
Knowledge of a technology and adoption of it are very different things-- knowledge here being more than awareness or even an understanding of usability. And more than anything, their behaviors and mass adoption of normal activities such as "Facebooking" are more or less indicative of the value in abstraction of technology-- that I can have a somewhat native understanding of how a social networking site works, regardless of which particular site it is (or previous usage of it) is a particular, generational knowledge that does divide baby boomers from 20somethings.
True, we don't have to "unlearn" previous behaviors or associations, but that is not our only advantage. We also already have intuitive understanding around the usability of these technologies, if not technical understanding.
Just, for example, in the OpenID debate, some are proponents of creating a brand identity and marketing around OpenID, while design and usability experts argue that "OpenID will only be useful when no one knows what it is."
Cheers!
@alisamleo
Posted by alisa leonard-hansen on Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 03:17 AM
I'm not sure the historical record would stand foursquare behind Mr. Shirky's claims about the changes in literacy. Take Jonathan Rose's magisterial "Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes" and you'll find broad participation in the sacred cathedral of great books among the working classes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Television certainly displaced that, but it wasn't the only cultural factor - anti-bourgeois theorizing about intrinsic working class "culture" among the left, various assaults on meritiocratic education also by the left, and legacies of general anti-educational sentiment (among the religious right in the American South) also played a significant role.
But all the various surveys of literacy undertaken in the U.S. (and also reflected elsewhere in the English-speaking world) point towards not just systematic sub-literacy (93 million Americans with basic or below basic literacy skills) but accelerating a-literacy, which is to say - the ability to read but the decision not to - and diminishing information skills. And the inescapable correlation is that this is a product of the rise of the internet. This can only be one of several factors, but the recent research by UCL for the British Library on how those born after 1993 search for information online shows that the digital divide is really a literacy divide - and that children without old-world literacy skills are largely lost on the information superhighway.
When you combine this with eye-tracking studies, and how people with poor literacy skills navigate through information on the Internet, the idea that it "has brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people" is unconvincing.Perhaps for the 13 million Americans who are proficient in literacy, it has provided more convenient ways of doing certain things. But for the majority it would seem to be a false good/god - something that is flattening and narrowing the experience of reading and reflection.
A short post like this can only sketch out the avenues of criticism and reflection that lead from Mr. Shirky's interview. And it is unfair to be too critical to someone being interviewed. But George Trow is not a substitute for serious research - and that, ironically, seems to be a recurring trope among those new media avatars who pronounce on the cultural and pedagogical impact of the Internet: informationally, it's wiki thin.
Posted by Trevor Butterworth on Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 07:53 AM
I'm not sure the historical record would stand foursquare behind Mr. Shirky's claims about the changes in literacy. Take Jonathan Rose's magisterial "Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes" and you'll find broad participation in the sacred cathedral of great books among the working classes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Television certainly displaced that, but it wasn't the only cultural factor - anti-bourgeois theorizing about intrinsic working class "culture" among the left, various assaults on meritiocratic education also by the left, and legacies of general anti-educational sentiment (among the religious right in the American South) also played a significant role.
But all the various surveys of literacy undertaken in the U.S. (and also reflected elsewhere in the English-speaking world) point towards not just systematic sub-literacy (93 million Americans with basic or below basic literacy skills) but accelerating a-literacy, which is to say - the ability to read but the decision not to - and diminishing information skills. And the inescapable correlation is that this is a product of the rise of the internet. This can only be one of several factors, but the recent research by UCL for the British Library on how those born after 1993 search for information online shows that the digital divide is really a literacy divide - and that children without old-world literacy skills are largely lost on the information superhighway.
When you combine this with eye-tracking studies, and how people with poor literacy skills navigate through information on the Internet, the idea that it "has brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people" is unconvincing.Perhaps for the 13 million Americans who are proficient in literacy, it has provided more convenient ways of doing certain things. But for the majority it would seem to be a false good/god - something that is flattening and narrowing the experience of reading and reflection.
A short post like this can only sketch out the avenues of criticism and reflection that lead from Mr. Shirky's interview. And it is unfair to be too critical to someone being interviewed. But George Trow is not a substitute for serious research - and that, ironically, seems to be a recurring trope among those new media avatars who pronounce on the cultural and pedagogical impact of the Internet: informationally, it's wiki thin.
Posted by Trevor Butterworth on Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 07:55 AM
As a non-fiction author living in a "remote" location, the internet is my best friend.
Posted by Katherine Gordon on Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 10:11 AM
"It's not so much that young people are smart and old people are scared. It's that young people don't have to unlearn all the stuff that old people do have to unlearn if we want to understand this world. And unlearning is just about the least fun activity in the world. So, you know, it's easy to understand why people don't want to sign up for it. But it's also kind of pathetic that the people going around talking about information overload don't stop to factor in the idea that if the twenty-year-olds aren't complaining about information overload, it probably isn't the problem we think it is."
Sorry but old people don't have to unlearn anything unless someone changes the rules then both old and young are the same if the rules are changed too often.
Posted by Bob McGowan on Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 08:18 PM
@Mayson @Clay
Hi Mason
Thanks for the pointer/plug! :-)
I met with Clay in 2008 at NYU. I didn't show him a demo but we had a pretty good talk.
Terry
Posted by Terry Jones on Fri 2 Jan 2009 at 07:24 AM
It seems a bit too clever to point out the library of Alexandria, claim that it contained way too much to read, and conclude that information overload has been old news for millennia.
Couldn't the reasons most twentysomethings don't complain of information overload have something to do with their unfamiliarity with the quiet, reflective, or simply well-organized or -filtered alternative?
Posted by Josh Young on Fri 2 Jan 2009 at 04:51 PM
I think that information overload can also largely be understood as a psychological problem, in addition to a problem with technology's filters needing to catch up. I still get anxious sometimes at the sheer number of quality books in the universe, and the fact that—as a human being with a finite lifespan—I will never read all of the ones that I want to read. The problem grows exponentially larger with all the new Quality Content that's now available online. But at a personal level, it's a real problem.
I also wrote a short essay on Clay's observations on information overload, and how they tie in to David Allen's Getting Things Done.
Posted by Chris Colón on Mon 5 Jan 2009 at 12:23 PM
Excellent interview, but I would argue that literary reading is alive and well. Tolstoy is a bestseller these days thanks to Oprah. The human craving for story remains intact and intense.
Posted by Jean on Mon 5 Jan 2009 at 07:13 PM
I have revisited this blog to follow the response trail.
Needless to say, not much was added except from Trevor Butterworth.
Reflecting on the past few months I would like to add one observation:
The inevitable creep from word to moving image as a means of expression.
Traffic on Youtube has now surpassed traffic (visits plus time on site) ont he top 10 web sites (including CNN).
What this predicts is a future of a non-word enabled society. Communication will be verbal with appropriate speech to text converters plus hyperlinks and tags to web enabled video media. One good thing - the camera will face both ways.
No need to burn books, the termites will do the job for you.
Posted by sylviechen on Tue 24 Mar 2009 at 11:52 PM
Thank you for this fascinating interview, which I found through a blog post by Jay Rosen, after reading one of his tweets. I do have to agree with Chris Colón's comment though that it's not simply a challenge of implementing innovative filtering. Absolutely this is a significant part of it. However, in a similar fashion to many people I know, I find information through the new media channels extremely quickly, granted many who are less technically savvy don't, which IS a filtering problem.
New media showers you with endless connects to more content, and some people have better filtering abilities than others, and better screening abilities to choose their preferred (or higher quality) content. So it's really a paradox of choice, and a matter of having self discipline perhaps. This is rather different than say, when in a library or book store where you may pickup several books on a subject to skim through.
Posted by Justin JDOG Marks on Sat 7 Nov 2009 at 06:19 AM
Clay, your comments about television are spot on. There has been no greater contributor to the decline in literary activities - ever.
As far as attention span goes - yes, I think we are a society of spastics that can't focus - EXCEPT - it's fairly amazing how long TV and movies can keep some people glued. No, it's really not an attention problem, it's an interest problem.
David Maynard
Posted by David Maynard on Thu 2 Jun 2011 at 03:03 PM
i agree
PS offtopic watch movies online yes all new movies here
Posted by Watch Movies on Sun 17 Jul 2011 at 03:50 AM