How do geographic and linguistic factors encourage or prevent online participation? How can social media websites better serve users with language and regional interfaces and policies that promote "the right to participate in the cultural life of the community"(UDHR, 1948)? To answer the questions above, I use the modernization theory of "social mobilization" to better theorize the so-called "cognitive surplus" as "social mobilization surplus" as the new labour forces created through digit-net work and literacies practices and technologies. How do we account for and create "social mobilization surplus"? I argue that this theoretical and practical question has important policy and research implications for better and critical online participation because virtual work is “linguistically constituted” and also “geographically configured” for social mobilization.

1. Geo-linguistic Dynamics of Virtual Work
in Wikipedia projects and beyond
Cognitive Surplus and Social Mobilization Theory
Han-Teng Liao’s presentation for
September 29, 2013

2. Virtual Work
or digital-net work (cf. paperwork)
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 Technologies aside, (virtual) work is “linguistically constituted”
and also “geographically configured”.
 (Virtual) work thus depends on the geo-linguistic support
system, including literacy and technology.
 “Cognitive surplus” needed to be accounted linguistically and
geographically
 cf. surplus-labour vs necessary labour in Marxist theory
 Social mobilization of (virtual) work
 Consider HSBC call center field trip in Malta

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middle-range theory of virtual work
Accounting (and then transferring)
“social mobilization surplus” or
“cognitive surplus”
into
potential “human resources” or
labour forces

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“Cognitive surplus” … visualized
McCandless (2010) visualized Shirky (2010)’s idea
http://infobeautiful2.s3.amazonaws.com/goggle_boxes.png

5. So how big is that “surplus”?
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Wikipedia editing
 So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of
unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole
project--every page, every edit,
every talk page, every line of code,
in every language that Wikipedia
exists in--that represents something
like the cumulation of 100 million
hours of human thought. I worked
this out with Martin Wattenberg at
IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope
calculation, but it's the right order of
magnitude, about 100 million hours
of thought.
Television watching
 Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S.
alone, every year. Put another way, now
that we have a unit, that's 2,000
Wikipedia projects a year spent watching
television. Or put still another way, in the
U.S., we spend 100 million hours every
weekend, just watching the ads…

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butthe US TV-viewing “cognitive surplus” is
not transferrablefor editing, say, Javanese Wikipedia
Shirky’s “cognitive surplus” is limited to
the first-world context
- when spare time is speculated to be
useful for virtual work (or digital net work)

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e.g. Javanese Wikipedia as an early attempt to create the
beginning of media-information-language literacy for
Javanese users to create the basic digital-net work literacy
for themselves (often without state support)
“Social mobilization” theory is not limited to
the first-world context, and it highlights the
role of media-information-language literacy
in the so-called “cognitive surplus”

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Who and which institution can benefit from the social
mobilization of Chinese-language users in digital networked
environment?
Chinese-language case:
social mobilization surplus of Chinese-language
users

9. Block-and-Diffusion: Disciplining the emerging
social mobilization of mainland Chinese Internet users.
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 the Internet development in China
 better-than-history growth after 2006
 actually “suppressed” significantly in
the early 2000s
 does not match the slow-fast-slow
innovation diffusion S-shape pattern
 does not match the other East Asian
regions
 Wikipedia in mainland China:
the critical years of 2005-2008
 “Great Firewall” as comparative
advantage given to Baidu Baike
 “Great Firewall” as divider for social
mobilization surplus from Chinese-
language internet users

10. Impacts: divided Chinese-language social
mobilization surplus via SERPs
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Block-and Diffusion of mainland Chinese Internet users
Redirecting and segregating the growing
mainland Chinese social mobilization
surplus (or “cognitive surplus”) of new
Internet users…

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Block-and Diffusion of mainland Chinese Internet users
or re-shaping the “social mobilization”
processes among Chinese-language users
and information

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Linguistically-constituted
Geographically-configured
Literacy, social mobilization and political development.
How do we account for social mobilization
surplus (or “cognitive surplus”) for more
than just first-world countries?
Chinese Internet users?
Indian Internet users?
Call-center workers?

14. Theoretical concepts: “social mobilization”
(cf. crowd-sourcing?)
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 “Social mobilization” theory (Deutsch, 1961): a process in
which “old social, economic, and psychological commitments
are eroded or broken and people become available for new
patterns of socialization and behavior.”
 the necessary prior conditions for political mobilization (Cameron,
1974)
 Common practices: nation-state building on mass literacy, mass
media, public culture and political development (usually mono-
lingualism)
 … a “linguistically constituted” public space. (Habermas, 1998, pp.
360-1)
 … a “geographically bounded” nation state
 Creating and accounting (national) “labour force”

15. Theoretical concepts: geo-linguistic
dynamics
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 “geo-linguistic dynamics”: both old and new patterns of
socialization and behaviours that is “linguistically-constituted”
and “geographically-configured”.
 Empirical bases:
 Global Wikipedia projects
 Global Voice
 Multi-lingual search engine markets and SEOs
 Multi-lingual cities
 “geo-linguistic groups of users”: users that are identified (and
sometimes codified, e.g. “en-UK”, “ar-EG”) by media and ICT
consumption and production systems.

16. Indicators of social mobilization surplus,
divided by geo-linguistic groups
(instead of countries)
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 Baseline proxy
 Time-use survey
 Internet penetration rates, Global Internet usage, etc.
 “Workaholic” cross-country comparison
 Actualized “virtual work” products of cognitive surplus
 Wikipedia statistics
 Twitter Translation Center
 TED Open Translation Project

17. Implications for research
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 Development indicators of geo-linguistic
groups (instead of nation-states)
 “developed” versus “developing” groups
 Development indicators of cross- and
trans- geo-linguistic pair comparisons
 Import vs Export
 Core-peripheral relationship among
languages (e.g. en-zh) or among regions
(e.g. ar-EG vs ar-QT, or pt-BR vs pt-PT)
 Strategic pairs: e.g. German-Turkish,
English-Spanish, Chinese-Arabic, etc.
 New media- and information- literacy
beyond (national) mass literacy programs
for new labour force

18. Implications for policy and market
development
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 Accounting/creating social mobilization surplus(or “cognitive
surplus”) for new markets and new labour force
 Better use of geo-linguistic and geo-cultural data/analysis to
measure and monitor existing and emerging cognitive surplus.

19. In a nutshell
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From creating/accounting (national) or
“labour force”
-- linguistic diversity as “bugs”
To creating/accounting (geo-linguistic)
“social mobilization surplus”
-- linguistic diversity as “features”
Virtual work is “linguistically
constituted” and also “geographically
configured” for social mobilization

20. Geo-linguistic Dynamics of Virtual Work
in Wikipedia projects and beyond
Cognitive Surplus and Social Mobilization Theory
Han-Teng Liao’s presentation for
September 29, 2013