I Can Haz Affordancez?

The other weekend, I was talking to a friend who is in his late sixties, and has kids my age. He had read somewhere that the minds of people born in the ‘90s work differently than those of people born closer to the middle of the century. The change came about because of “screen time,”—or time spent looking at a TV or computer rather than playing soccer or helping old ladies cross the street—a super scary thing that people with kids apparently need to worry about. When he said that he was sure my wife and I would be good parents and limit our son’s “screen time,” I said it didn’t scare me, and he couldn’t understand why.

When my friend was young, screen time meant passively consuming. Even for his daughters, now in their thirties, screen time was largely passive, though the screen was much more colorful, so this was something he needed to keep an eye on. But when I think about my son’s relationship to screens, I’m just not all that worried. The screen is no longer a one-way portal, dumping information and images into the mind of the viewer. Clay Shirky explores the significance and scope of this evolution in our relationship to screens in Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators.

Social media allows us to keep in contact with others, of course, but it also allows users to share things they’ve created, however significant or inane. For example, I could post pictures on Facebook, but I could also post pictures that I’ve altered, giving me a creative outlet as well as a place to share content. Shirky uses a similar example: the lolcat (17). Photos of cats with captions do not change the world, but they require more creativity than watching Mork and Mindy, and, as Shirky points out, some lolcats are more successful than others, indicating that one can do it wrong (18). No matter how inane, lolcats require some amount of attention to detail.

But let’s not limit the everyday products of technology to the inane. Shirky also notes Kenyan political activist Ory Okolloh’s Ushahidi, a service that began with Okolloh blogging about violence in Kenya and became an online venue for people to post information about violence that occurred after the Kenyan election in 2007, information to which few had access because “in Kenya in early 2008, the processional weren’t covering it, out of partisan fervor or censorship, and the government had no incentive to report anything” (16). Ushahidi aggregated the reports of many to provide a picture of post-election Kenya that other sources aimed to keep hidden, and without both the tools technology provides and the good will of those who posted, this would not have been possible.

And the good will I mentioned above does not spring necessarily from one’s character, but rather from the affordances technologies allow us. Shirky does not blame himself for spending time watching the same plot unfold on Gilligan’s Island (21), nor does he characterize young people who shared music on Napster as inherently morally bankrupt even though they broke the law (125). In the former case, TV viewers in the 1970’s had no creative outlet like lolcats; the TV screen worked in only one direction. In the latter, Shirky claims that the only reason not to share music files even though it takes nothing from the person sharing is spite (125). I would add that fear of breaking the law could be a reason, too. I didn’t use Napster, because artists, such as Metallica, were suing people for copyright infringement, and I didn’t want any trouble. Metallica scares me. 

Shirky also characterizes TV viewing as a solitary act. In fact, according to Shirky, television viewing can replace socializing, and there is a correlative relationship between television watching and happiness (7). But as things change, as we encounter more opportunities to create and interact with others online, we watch less television. We find passive consumption boring because we have other options.

In the 1990s, television changed somewhat. At least that’s how I remember it. I had email and went online, and pretty much all of my friends did, too, and I think television was changing to meet the needs of an audience that expected more from their “screen time.” People started watching television on television, because (and I’m only hypothesizing here, but it sounds good, so humor me) we, the non-televised viewers, were more connected with one another. Beavis and Butthead let us watch videos with two stupid teens, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 let us watch movies with Joel and his robot friends. In fact, MST3000 put those characters in the frame, adding visually as well as aurally to the old movies that were simply not enough for us anymore. The commentary of Beavis, Butthead, or Joel was not ours, but, much like the relationships television had for years simulated, they partially filled a need in the viewer to create commentary, thus interacting with their media.

OK, but so what? Why does it matter that some of us spend our leisure time creating memes and videos and (less often) information sources like Ushahidi? For the individual, this ability to create makes a difference because each of us can employ the affordances of the programs and platforms available to express ourselves and mitigate the isolating effects of the televised latter half of the 20th century. But individuals are small, and my ability to express myself has little significance to anyone other than me and anyone who likes my Facebook posts.

Well, the burgeoning of online activity has forced some of us into an uncomfortable situation: the reconfiguring of the ego as a driving force for intellectual or creative activity. The illusion that brilliant individuals solve problems of create in a bubble is dissolving in the face of increasingly active screen time because we have more access to each other and our ideas. Shirky writes about aggregate data and “collaborative spirals” (126), but Surowiecki gives concrete examples of how aggregate data can solve problems.

Francis Galton discovering that one out of 800 citizens could not guess the weight of an ox but the average of the 800 guesses came close (XIII), or John Craven aggregating the guesses of naval officers to find a lost submarine (XX) show that aggregate data allows us to enjoy the accuracy of that data without worrying about the precision. In other words, when there is enough data, we can find the average, thus eliminating the need for precision.

Between Shirky and Surowiecki, we get a picture of how the affordances of Internet technology allow for collaboration and expression, but we also see the value of such collaboration. Many of Surowiecki’s examples precede the Internet, but they prove increasingly valuable in an era when we have access to large amounts of instantly creatable data that can be just as easily manipulated as created. And I want my son to have the opportunity to participate in this sharing of content and information, so no, I'm not terribly worried about his "screen time."