Here Comes Everybody has a great post (Clay Shirkyon’s lightly edited transcript of a speech at a web 2.0 conference) about the social surplus which television (and I’d add in to the picture associated passive consumption media- radio, movies, etc.) have been using. I’ll quote a few parts of the article below and add a few thoughts of my own below that.
First, a little background intro for the meat of the piece:
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.
Clay has apparently recently finished writing a book called Here Comes Everybody and was being interviewed by a television producer for possible inclusion on a TV program. He gives as an example of something interesting that’s “out there” the editing of wikipedia’s page on Pluto after its downgrade from planetary status.
she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
So how big is that surplus? 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.
And 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.
Down a bit further, Clay continues
However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.
This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
and
this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
Read Clay’s piece in its entirety here
Now, here are some of my thoughts/ideas which seem related enough to this post by Clay to merit inclusion. Leading Sustainable Conversations tipped me off to Clay’s piece through tag surfing WordPress and has some interesting thoughts along the lines of- what if instead of 1% taken from TV and added to wikipedia it could be 10% added to face to face social networking?
I’ll link here to a future post which I’m about to write on mixtapes 2.0.
Then, I’m also reminded of the food surplus which we can create eating lower on the food chain and/or finding more efficient sources for our nutritional needs, as I mentioned earlier in a comment on the politics of food.
One of the other things I enjoy speculating about is when/where/whether the downward spiral of the consumer infotainment mass media trend gets upstaged by economic/environmental issues or people seeking/creating actual information which has value to them.
And, given the opportunity and tools to produce something I’m interested in I’ll find/make the time- witness the muckety maps (the latest one is here, it’s on- how did you guess- the media) I’ve shared here, for one example.