the end of cognitive zoning

Lots of buzz around Shirky's cognitive surplus post.
To me the idea is very similar to my assertion that peer production happens mostly in the bright areas of the world at night map, in the places where we have the leisure time to do these things.  (See where in the world are users generating?)

Shirky's idea is presented as reclaiming the time that was lost for generations to television, but I think of it as more like cognitive re-zoning.

We still live in the echo of the Industrial Age.  And the Industrial Age gave us efficiency, Taylorism, and as part of that, zoning.

How our space is organized has a deep relationship with how our lives are organized, which in turn shapes the possibilities for the lives we can lead.

Think about old houses, each small room for its specific purpose, the kitchen, the dining room, the front reception room (closed, for guest visits only).  Now think of new, unzoned designs, the flowing great rooms that are now preferred, kitchen into dining room into living room.

Zoning permeated, and still permeates, our lives.  There are 9-5 weekdays, where you PRODUCE (or if a student, LEARN), and 5-11 weekdays and all day weekends, when you CONSUME.

Drive into the city work zone to PRODUCE, drive out to the suburbs to CONSUME.

All nice tidy zones.  And zones which made sense in the industrial age, since to live next to where you worked at that time was to be next to a giant smoking clanking factory.  And if you're doing physical work all day, you really do need downtime just so your body doesn't collapse.

The problem with zoning in the post-industrial age is that it's an epic disaster.  A disaster of urban planning, and a disaster of social engagement.  PRODUCE and CONSUME excludes a lot of desirable things.  Like say, Think, Reflect, Eat, Discuss, Discover, Continue to Learn... basically, most of the things that make life worth living.

And in the unzoned life in the unzoned city, all of these things can flow naturally together.  Not in a destructive way, in which PRODUCE expands into your downtime so that you are always working, but in an organic way, so that you are able to mix working, learning, thinking, relaxing...

Sometimes people say to me about blogging, isn't it a waste of time, where will people find the time, which is nonsense.  All old-style PRODUCE does is define a tiny set of things: meetings, emails, legacy inefficient processes, as "work", and anything else as non-work.  So you end up in a time of constant change when you've literally defined learning and planning out of your work day.  It's no wonder people can't adapt to change.

Lorcan has a great quote from the Economist in his blog, which he is using to discuss mobility, but which I will use to talk about the death of zoning

“a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”

I think the language is interesting: "ad-hoc workspaces".  Because a workspace should be what - fixed?  Established?  Serious?  I would put it another way: there is no work zone and home zone.  There is only place and context.  Today the coffeshop is a place to sit in the sun and chat with friends, tomorrow you're writing a report there on your laptop.  Today your computer room is for playing World of Warcraft, tomorrow you're filling in a spreadsheet.

Think about your spaces and your cognitive activities in an unzoned world.  How do things change?  We've already seen great progress in libraries on this, as they accept food and noise and gaming and more.  And I think we're also starting to see progress in some organizations as people's work activities and groups are unzoned, so the we can cross silos and we can mix blog reading and writing in with Very Serious Business Meetings.

As well, as luck would have it, we already have some models that we can draw upon, as most of the world's great cities give us examples of mixed, zoneless life, where you can move from work to shopping to eating to an art gallery to a park, all within the space of a few blocks.

In case you're wondering why I uppercased producer and consumer, it's to highlight how these roles are reintegrating, or dezoning, back into prosumer, as envisioned notably by Toffler.

Previously:
December 18, 2006  the Internet, it's made of people