The Lolcat Problem

The lolcat problem is the name this book gives to the specific form of critical dismissal that treats a creative medium as evaluable by its median output. When Shirky described the first cognitive surplus, the rebuttal that circulated among skeptics came in one word: lolcats. The word was a shorthand for the argument that when you give humans tools for participation and time to deploy them, they do not produce Tolstoy or Linux; they produce misspelled captions on photographs of cats. The argument seemed to dismantle Shirky's case. The response was that critics were evaluating the surplus by its median rather than its distribution. The median output of any creative medium, at any point in its history, is mediocre; the value of the medium is determined by its tail. The lolcats were not the counter-evidence to participatory culture; they were its experimental substrate, the millions of people learning new creative habits that a fraction of would eventually deploy for purposes of greater consequence.