Clay shirky is an American writer and business consultant, mainly engaged in the research of Internet technology and social networking sites. He has published many columns in the Wall Street Journal, Business Review, new york Times Wired and other well-known media, and provided consulting services to enterprises including Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, BBC, Lego and the US Navy. Clay shirky has been focusing on the research on the impact of network economy on social economy, and is called "the greatest thinker of Internet revolution" by the industry.
About this book
Cognitive surplus explains the current situation: with the development of internet interactive tools, people's free time can be used not only for content consumption, but also for sharing and creation. This book can be said to have laid a theoretical foundation for the sharing economy, and can help us better understand the changes that the emergence of Internet tools will bring to the traditional social organization model and economic rules.
Core content
With the development of internet tools, the cost of sharing and collaboration is greatly reduced, and people's free time can be fully utilized, thus becoming a resource, which we call "cognitive surplus". If you want a group of people to contribute their cognitive surplus continuously, it is not enough to rely on their intrinsic motivation. You need to build a network with perfect cooperation mechanism to enjoy the community. However, the decentralized collaborative form of online enjoyment will bring new opportunities and challenges to the traditional business model, corporate propaganda strategy and personal development path.
First, the basic conditions for generating "cognitive surplus"
In the current society, "cognitive surplus" can become a kind of resource, which benefits from two conditions, namely, people's intrinsic motivation to do things and the emergence of internet collaboration tools.
1. Users do have the intrinsic motivation of "selfless dedication" to their free time.
There are two main internal motivations for people to do things: out of love, or to gain recognition. For example, the example of "Zephyr Boy" mentioned in the book, a group of young people used their spare time to organize a skateboarding league. They exchanged ideas and skills, changed skateboarding from a children's toy "land surfboard" into a competitive event, and matched it with corresponding clothing and music, which can be said to define the modern skateboarding culture. This group of people did it out of pure love for skateboarding. Similarly, gaining a sense of identity is also an important internal motivation for people to do things. When a person can let more people know and recognize his ability through sharing, he will have inner satisfaction.
Take Tianya Forum, the earliest forum in China, as an example. Many people serialize their novels on it for anyone to read for free. Just like the best-selling history book "What happened in the Ming Dynasty" in 2006, it was serialized for free on Tianya Forum for the first time. During the period of writing a book, the author was paid nothing, and the recognition from readers was the main motivation to encourage him to keep writing.
2. The appearance of Internet allows information to flow in both directions between any network nodes.
Before the birth of the Internet, the flow of information depended on traditional media such as television, radio and newspapers. These traditional media have a unique feature, that is, one-way output, and users only need to passively accept it. So the media at that time was a communication tool, which was used to spread the content produced by professional media people to people. With the advent of the Internet, the flow of information has changed from one-way to two-way. Users are both consumers and producers of content. At the same time, the whole Internet is an open architecture and does not belong to any company or institution. Therefore, whether you are the CEO of Google or an ordinary student, you can speak equally on the Internet.
Now, the Internet has been integrated with our lives, allowing us to communicate and interact with others anytime and anywhere. Therefore, the fragmented time such as waiting for the bus and eating can also be used, and the threshold and cost of cooperation are greatly reduced.
Second, how to build a network enjoyment community?
If you want a group of people to contribute their "cognitive surplus" continuously, you need to design a cooperation mechanism. Just like planting a tree only needs soil and seeds, but it needs an ecosystem to make the tree grow well. This ecosystem is called "Net * * * Enjoy Community". There are four key points to consider when building a network and enjoying a community.
1. Ensure that the services provided by the community are useful through early small-scale pilot projects.
"Useful" here means that the service can meet the needs of users. If the services provided meet the false demand, the community will be difficult to operate.
2. Establish a feedback mechanism to encourage service providers to provide services continuously.
Although people can share their cognitive surplus through the Internet, the whole process is full of uncertainty. After all, customers can not share if they want to, and we can't order customers to contribute. In order to solve this problem, the community needs to design a set of feedback mechanism to ensure the continuity of community service by catering to the intrinsic motivation of users.
Clay shirky called "establishing feedback mechanism" as "guiding behavior with opportunities", that is, the intrinsic motivation of users is rewarded, and then the continuous behavior of users is guided. As we discussed before, intrinsic motivation includes the love of one thing and the pursuit of identity. Therefore, we can guide them to provide services continuously by meeting their self-realization needs.
3. Through service quality management, consumers can get high-quality services quickly.
If a community wants to retain users, it must always give customers the best service experience. In the initial stage of community operation, due to small scale and few services, service quality can be ensured by screening service providers. For example, the early invitation registration system adopted in Zhihu. However, with the increase in the number of service providers, everyone's level is definitely different, and the proportion of quality services will be lower and lower. If it is not controlled at this time, there will be a situation that "bad money drives out good money", and it is difficult for consumers to obtain high-quality services efficiently. Therefore, managing the quality of service can retain consumers.
4. By creating community culture, let the community run independently and healthily.
For the community, community culture is its temperament. Through this temperament, outstanding talents can be attracted to take the initiative to join, and "doing nothing" can be truly realized. The author cites the example of quiet car to prove that the formation of culture can reduce operating costs. American companies have set up quiet carriages on many trains, and are not allowed to make loud noises, play music or make phone calls in public places. An interesting situation is that once someone breaks the order, such as answering the phone, passengers will stand up and stop it. The reason why passengers dare to do this is because they have a backer. They believe that if there is a conflict, the flight attendants will support themselves and force the other party to carry out it. This has greatly reduced the operating cost of trains and gradually formed a brand effect.
Third, what opportunities and challenges will the cooperation form of "* * * enjoying culture" and "decentralization" bring?
1. "Decentralization" cooperation will break the tripartite model of workers, sellers and consumers in the traditional business model, and producers can also be sellers and consumers at the same time, so that the marginal cost of providing services will approach zero.
For example, the example of Wikipedia proves that intellectuals all over the world can edit documents together in a decentralized way. The example of the local car company in Phoenix proves that cars can also be designed and manufactured through cooperation. 10.5 million car enthusiasts will provide solutions for the design of a rickshaw, and the parts involved in these solutions are all produced by "micro-factories" scattered all over the United States through technologies such as 3D printing. In just a few years, the "decentralized" cooperation emphasized by the author has changed from a handful of cases to a new production model. It can be said that almost everything from knowledge to products, from software to hardware can be produced in a decentralized form.
2. Enterprises can get twice the result with half the effort by making good use of new media.
With the emergence of the Internet, the flow of information no longer revolves around traditional media, and the influence of new Internet media represented by official WeChat accounts will become more and more important in public opinion. In the future, enterprises must make good use of new media resources if they want to do a good job in publicity.
For individuals, having multiple identities will become a normal job.
The emergence of "decentralized" collaboration makes the threshold for joining an organization infinitely lower, and a person can play different roles at different times. For example, you can be a company employee during the day, a writer at night and a lecturer at weekends. Therefore, you can find a corresponding platform to "contribute" any knowledge and skills, and your personal ability will be fully explored and enjoyed.
line
1. In the Spring and Autumn Period, Guan Zhong once put forward the idea of "taking it from the intangible", which means "letting the people contribute taxes without knowing it". Now the development of Internet tools also allows everyone to use their free time to produce content without any burden. This paves the way for the transformation of free time into "cognitive surplus".
2. If you want a group of people to contribute their cognitive surplus continuously, you need to design a cooperation mechanism. Just like planting a tree only needs soil and seeds, but it needs an ecosystem to make the tree grow well. This ecosystem is called "Net * * * Enjoy Community".
3. The emergence of the Internet makes the flow of information no longer revolve around traditional media, and the influence of new Internet media represented by official WeChat accounts will become more and more important in public opinion.
4. The emergence of "decentralized" collaboration has broken the tripartite model of workers, sellers and consumers in the traditional business model, and producers can also be sellers and consumers. This makes the marginal cost of future services expected to approach zero.
If you have outstanding talent, you should seize the opportunity to show it. Because the Internet provides opportunities for everyone to show their talents, it will become a normal job for capable people to have multiple identities.