All work and no play

A luxurious, colossal hotel on a scenic wintry, snowy mountain from a Thomas Kinkade painting. A large industrial kitchen customized for gourmet chefs out of Bon Appetit magazine. A lush garden maze from Better Homes and Gardens. And the space and solidarity to enjoy, savor and revel in this all for yourself, without those obnoxious tourists congesting every inch of your personal space.

This all sounds very picturesque, but it may also sound like a movie many of you have seen or a book you might have read by a familiar author, Steven King, called “The Shining.”

Jack Torrance takes a position as a winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a very elaborate yet haunted hotel. Initially, the setup sounds ideal: Jack will spend the winter at the hotel when it’s closed for business to maintain its facilities, while he works alone in peace and silence on his next novel. However, the isolation from humanity ultimately culminates in cabin fever, and he tries to kill his family.

I don’t know exactly why this story came to my mind after reading “Cognitive Surplus.” But I do think there is some importance in connecting it to “The Shining.”

Obviously there are many other factors contributing to Jack Torrance’s downfall -- creepy ghosts, his alleged alcoholism and the hotel’s haunted condition -- but there is something about working and living completely alone with barely any human interaction that I find very important to explore in an era when you can reach, connect and talk to people without ever having to speak to them or see them in person.

Clay Shirky's sequel book, “Cognitive Surplus,” starts where his debut, “Here Comes Everybody,” ends. Shirky demonstrates how the Internet’s disposition for open participation has opened doors for group activity, allowing us to be much more creative than in the past.

Shirky provides us with an explanation about group projects -- ICanHazCheezburger and Wikipedia -- and their success: people like sharing and working with each other. And there is a construction and foundation on the Internet that promotes and facilitates this kind of communal sharing and exchange among people. By exploring the Internet and these new outlets, we can all create social change and improvements that employ hundreds, thousands and even millions of people either to help with a cause or to just simply entertain each other. Social media offers equivalent opportunities for all people to consume, produce and share.

Even though the ICanHazCheezburger campaign isn’t a very important or valuable example of Internet sharing, it still leads to some participation and interaction among people. And some participation might lead to other projects that are more noteworthy and relevant to more people. The important part to remember is that the Internet allows more people to come together and collaborate who ordinarily would not or could not have participated in the past. And by amassing more people, more can be done.

By being able to freely and openly consume, produce and share with others, we become much more innovative and confident in what we are producing and sharing. Rather than writing the same creepy, unoriginal line over and over again on our typewriters (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”), we can talk, correspond and bounce ideas off of other people and employ other people to help us live up to our potential.

Groups and working together are important. Isolation doesn’t get you very far, especially in this era of social media innovation when millions of people are connected. You cannot lock yourself in a room by yourself and expect to complete an extensive project in solitude, much like Jack in “The Shining.” Yes, you do need time alone to think, muse or ponder over your own ideas, but you need to talk to others about it to maximize your potential.

Severe isolation like that in “The Shining” only squashes creativity, productivity, inspiration and imagination.

Maybe if Jack Torrance had a wireless laptop, “The Shining” would have had a very different, more productive and more amiable ending.