Cognitive surplus and Roadies...

Why do people like Mtv roadies this much? Led me to think. These days stories and movies are getting too hard to empathize with. Not every other person is a homicide detective or masked vigilante. So there is this vacuum to be filled in at prime time. Audience at these hours seek to meet their ‘cognitive surplus’.

There is certain idea floated by sociologist and thinker, Clay shirky, called ‘cognitive surplus’…(designers too are fond of this word, if we want to order bheja fry in Irani hotel, we would ask for cognitive tadka!). I see a good deal of substance in this observation. A man would like to spend his faculties in pursuits of different things in a day. What he calls cognitive surplus may sound like a heavy word for ‘free time’. But it is more than that. Of course what we do with our free time is only thing where one exercises choice. The rest of the activities are becoming so basic and commonplace that even expressing affection is also getting packaged in different forms and ready off-the-shelf.

In his book, here comes everybody (have not read it but read about it) he says, in 70’s cognitive surplus was a need which was met with soaps and sitcoms, but now it is an asset at work, as one finds it as a prime driver in collaborative authoring like Wikipedia. A concept also promoted in the book, wisdom of crowd.

Talking of sitcoms and soaps, we have it in our own K series and now let me stretch it to today’s reality shows like Roadies. Every one watch them and like to talk about them and give an opinion and feel included in the ‘game’. We hate them but still we watch it. Its most vicarious pleasure in seeing somebody doing things you would not do yourselves either ‘cause they are taboo or you do not have balls.

These shows result into engaging experience (?!) to many is ‘cause of one fact. What the characters in this show script is just a little bit more than average acceptable behavior.

They want the behavioral envelope to be pushed just a little bit not too much, like in a meeting or coffee conversation I score by saying this, or I could have done that.
Reality shows and the people in them try to recreate the similar situations resulting into consciously scripted situational entertainment around the emotional needs of this audience.

Mtv audience is one of the most brash and exposed lot. To make them stick around this channel, they are always in need for freshness in ideas and thinking. I used to like it for that. But with reality shows and catering to ‘needs’ feels like going out of hand.

I am not a big time Tv fan, but whenever got time in front of it, I surf channels till I drop dead. I get my quota of sitcoms through p2p and watch them in one-go one after the other like stress eating.

The form of entertainment we are subjected these days, there is need for filtering and suggestion mechanism to bring up the good from mediocre. Till the time I am better off with my pc.