Slashdot Mirror
Mining the Cognitive Surplus
Clay Shirky has been giving talks on his book Here Comes Everybody — his "masterpiece," per Cory Doctorow — and BoingBoing picks up one of them, from the Web 2.0 conference. Shirky has come up with a quantification of the attention that TV has been absorbing for more than half a century. Shirky defines as a unit of attention "the Wikipedia": 100 million person-hours of thought. As a society we have been burning 2,000 Wikipedias per year watching mostly sitcoms. We're stopping now. Here's a video of another information-dense Shirky talk, this one at Harvard.
I don't think that stopping the practice of watching long hours of re-ran Seinfeld episodes, so that you can spend even more hours writing and following links to various discussions and trivia about Seinfeld episodes and looking for places to download bootlegs of the same is an indication that, finally, all of that brainpower is getting put back to productive use.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If, in defending the free exchange of media, we note that each "pirated" copy does not necessarily equal a lost sale, why should we think watching sitcoms necessarily equals lost useful effort?
I've been without broadcast TV for 15 years or so, and I find plenty of other trivia to waste my time on. Lacking the daily homogenizing input, I am kind of awkward in conversation with strangers or casual acquaintances. I don't know any of the little catch phrases from the sitcoms, or what any of the sports teams are doing. It would do my social life a lot of good if I watched TV, but I just can't hack it.
I also think that it's a good thing a lot of these folks have the TV to watch. It gives them something to talk about, and keeps them inside, out of trouble. I don't think the infinite number of monkeys technique really applies to advancing human thought. If they're captivated by sitcoms, it's doubtful they are going to have much to contribute.
Wait until they discover that, as the proverb says, "a change of work is the best rest".
The age of mediocrity. The irony is that TV makers brought it onto themselves by constantly lowering standards. The overall productivity of millions of people might topple the productivity of a couple thousand professionals, but it comes at the cost of having to deal with mediocre performance in order to not turn off contributors. If something good comes of it, I would like it to be that professionals realize that their only chance is quality, not finding ever cheaper ways to produce filler.
A. Wikipedia has no original information (in theory), it is a repository of cites, so it's a poor choice for what could be accomplished by people using their leisure time to work and actually create something new.
B. What could have been done by all the people reading about this study? And these are intelligent, slashdot-people. Well, some of them.
C. How much productivity, measured in Swimming-Pool-Empire-State-Building-Einstein-Years, is lost by not embracing genetic manipulation to improve average intelligence and produce a master race?
D. Yawn.
Azural - instrumentals
He's right and his proof was made before he wrote the article, evidenced by the existence of Wikipedia itself. For this one project alone, 1/10,000 of the cognitive surplus of one year has already been harvested.
He['s] making a compelling case for the end of the TV era.One can only hope. The TV is last century technology. It brought information into the collective consciousness. Computers and the internet will likely prove to be as powerful this century.
His major point is that TV is a 1-way collective technology while computers are a 2-way collective technology. So, while advertisers and TV companies guided collective thought for the second half of last century, the internet makes it possible for the masses to guide collective thought today. Hopefully the trend will go in this direction. Only legislation could reverse it.
Just callin' it like I see it.
I don't know anyone that still watches TV like people used to in the 90s. I haven't rtfa'd yet, but if he's saying that those hours will be put to good use now that we're not watching sitcoms I'm not so hopeful; it's not like you can't waste time on the net, that's all a lot of people (most?) use it for.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
He's probably right, the TV era is going away and getting replaced with the MMORPG era.
Not that it makes any difference whether we waste our time on soap operas or getting epix though.
The irony is that TV makers brought it onto themselves by constantly lowering standards.
I don't think that's true. Compare a season of "Heroes" to a season of "A-Team" or "Night Rider". Look at the quality progression of "Star Trek" "Star Trek:the Next Generation" "Battlestar Galactica". I think television quality has migrated towards the extremes, there is some television that is very good, and some that makes Charlie the Unicorn look brilliant. I'm hoping that the rise of YouTube is going to be the end of reality TV.
We are all just people.
Sometimes you need mental downtime, just like physical downtime. If you've just finished running a marathon, you aren't really going to want to go shovel your driveway right afterwards, nor are you likely to be effective if you do. Your body is worn out and needs to relax. Well, the same is true of the mind after hard work. Sometimes you just need to relax. There is nothing wrong with this, and in fact can make you more effective when you do go back to work.
Then, of course, there's the problem of assuming there's something wrong with goofing off. I don't know why some people seem to think life should be nothing but work. On the grand scale, what is the point of living if all you do is have no fun? There is nothing at all wrong with goofing off, and if people want to goof off by watching TV, that's fine.
There is no reason why people should have to be (or even could be) productive every waking hour of the day. It's ok if you just want to kick back and goof off. After all, I'd say that's what the work is for in the first place.
I'm about to graduate from college and at the end of this semester, I realized I had a ton of math homework that I needed to do in order to pass. Why was this the case? I'm a smart guy so it's really not very difficult for me, and it's not just busywork.
I had been wasting time playing video games. I decided about 3 weeks ago that I wasn't going to spend my time doing things that have no outcome and only serve as time sinks: no video games, no pot smoking, no TV watching(unless it's informative). Exceptions (like social events) do exist, but I've stuck to it.
Since then, I put time into my senior seminar and it ended up kicking ass, done a whole semester's worth of math in about 4 straight days, greatly increased my guitar playing ability, learned to meditate, and learned a new programming language. I've also taken care of loads of smaller things I may have just ignored and come closer to some friends and family. Most of this great success is due to the fact that I've eliminated my biggest time sink (video games). I imagine I'll also have more money, since video games are expensive and I'm selling my X360.
These changes have allowed me to come closer to my full potential, and I don't regret it one bit. For me, video games took hours (years?) of time that I'll never get back, but at least I'm young enough that it's not too late. I feel like I just woke up from a coma.
I strongly encourage everyone to examine his time-sinking habits and eliminate them; it may change your life!
Seriously, do you even know what the word "proof" means? Your statement isn't based on any kind of fact so it may not even be true itself, much less prove anything else.
The article is based on two whopping unfounded assumptions:
- That this cognitive surplus even exists. It's possible that people simply have a finite amount of thought available per unit time and that this thought is already being completely expended. The fact that people in the past had much less free time is meaningless; they also had much less requirement for thought in their work and in their lives. Maybe a consequence of the move from mindless drones to modern thought-workers is that there isn't much thought left to be used in the free time created.
- That mental effort is interchangeable. This should be obviously false, not just unproven. It should be clear to anyone who has interacted with humans that when any kind of goal is at stake, some people's brains are vastly more effective at reaching it than others. If your goal is some physics problem, an hour of Albert Einstein's brain is probably worth more than the entire lifetime of that girl who made me a sandwich at the deli today. You can't say that there are X person-hours being wasted in front of the TV which could do awesome things if they were put to use elsewhere. These are not CPU cycles, you can't just load new software and go.
Now, overall I think that the guy's talk has a good point and tells a lot of truth. But it goes too far when talking about mental effort as if it were fungible, and there's no way that any of his conclusions are proven at all, much less by the mere existence of Wikipedia.
Improving the quality of TV is like improving the quality of shit...at the end of the day it's still shit.
Debian FTW
What's the difference if a construction worker spends his free time watching Blue Collar comedy tour or reading Sports Illustrated? Neither have any influence on his production, so any greater point about cognitive surplus wasted watching TV is meaninglesss.
The problem is Shirky didn't take a few things into account:
1. TV is analogous to several types of leisure activity. Any serious discussion of productivity or 'time' wasted watching TV much occur in the greater context of all the things people do when they are not working.
2. Depending a person's main area of work, watching TV may be helpful, even necessary for them to work effectively. This factor must be taken into account. A person working in TV production, music, journalism...hell even health care, religious work, and education could find legitimate and relevant information on television that will increase their productivity and therefore not be a "waste of time"
3. I can think of more, but I have an article to write, so I'd better not waste any more time posting about how this Shirky guy's ideas about wasted man hours watching TV are lacking basic support....ah irony
Thank you Dave Raggett
- Bertrand Russell
Unlike that shitty stuff on television, we produce only the finest art on youtube.com.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yea.. and you don't own a TV, right? You're so trendy and hip that I think I'm going to puke.
And don't even try to tell me that things like YouTube make TV unnecessary, because if you think TV is shit, it's much, much worse on YouTube. I think I drop an IQ point every time I hit that site.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
TFA is still full of it, IMHO.
1. As others already pointed out, you _can't_ do mental work for 16 hours a day and still be top-productivity. And the GP's post isn't just "possible", it's actually proven.
I remember at least one study where some students were asked to solve some complicated maths problems. Some were told to take a break, get a good night's sleep, etc. Some were told to forge ahead, keep at it all day, and generally do the kind of 16 hours a day mental work that TFA implicitly assumes possible. (You know, the whole assumption being that you could work on Wikipedia if you weren't watching TV.) The guys who had a more humane schedule actually finished faster.
You can see this in places where massive overtime is constantly demanded too. (E.g., most of the computer games industry.) In the long term people just get tired, make more mistakes, and eventually burn out.
The brain does tire, same as everything else. You can cheat a bit by using different parts of it. E.g., if you write programs at work, you write about physics on Wikipedia or do some creative stuff at home. But even that only goes so far.
We also know by now, that the brain has finite buffers. And overflow just causes E.g., the first (short-term) buffer is only 8 seconds. If you don't take a short break (just watch the ceiling for 10 seconds, or do 10 steps around the room) to let it flush when you overload it, data starts being discarded. The next one we know about is about 3 days worth, and apparently data from it is only "persisted" to permanent memory during REM sleep. Again, ploughing through a lot of information too fast, and/or skipping enough sleep, can cause data to be lost. (Essentially doing 2 all-nighters before an exam in college guarantees that you'll know that stuff for the exam, but forget it immediately afterwards.)
So, yes, it is not only possible, but known and proved that people can only do so much mental work per day and still be productive.
2. It's also a matter of interests. You're the most productive for the things that keep you at least a bit interested and maybe even entertained. E.g., if you're fascinated by, say, history but hate geography, you could maintain some history pages on Wikipedia, but basically trying to maintain geography pages would be a chore.
What I'm getting at here, though, is that only a narrow minority of the population, the "nerds", develop some sort of obsession with a narrow domain. (It's one of the invariant symptoms in Asperger's, for example.) Or enough of it to do it in their free time.
Most of the people just don't develop enough of an interest in anything to really further human knowledge. Even if you could un-invent TV overnight, they'd go to the pub instead, not start studying some science. And if you forced them at gun-point to do science in their free time, they'd take it as a chore and do a half-arsed job that doesn't really benefit anyone.
3. Singling out TV is freaking stupid. For as long as we have a recorded history, and even from the primitive tribes we found, people have _some_ time where they just relax and/or are entertained.
They go to the pub, or sit around the fire and gossip, or have a tribal dance in the village centre, or whatever appropriate for the time and place. Long before TV and computer games, people played cards, dice, or whatever other unproductive passtime. Chess was invented as a 4 player wargame, actually modeling the units used at the time. It was the primitive version of Command And Conquer, not t3h uber-intellectual challenge for nerds. (Then they figured out that, many centuries before the Internet, it's a pain to find 4 players at the same time. So they made it for 2 players, each taking command of 2 armies. That's why you have 2 of each piece. And one King became Grand Vizier, and the most powerful piece in the game. It's what now we call a Queen.) Etc.
Or if we're at "TV", people used to go to a theatre for exactly the same purpose as watching a movie on TV. Pretty much any
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There seems to be a widespread assumption in modern western societies that free time = wasted time.
...
Somehow there's an expectation that people should use every waking moment to do something "productive". The best example of this trend are Blackberries and how they so often are used to extend one's working hours to to every single free moment we had left.
Especially in Anglo-Saxon societies, people are expected to work continuously, eat at their desks,have no breaks and take work home with them - it's nuts: half the mid-level decision makers seem to be in a constant state of overstressed exhaustion, so no wonder overall corporate productivity is low, wrong decisions are common and a state of barely contained chaos is the rule. Nobody is thinking of the big picture - they're all keeping up with the flow of data (95% worthless chaff) and running around putting out fires.
And now this article
This is totally against the way the brain works - people absolutely need some sort of mental "decompression" time. Passive consumption of intellectually-undemanding TV entertainment is a form of relaxation and release from everyday stress.
Television might be crap, but it serves a purpose - entertainment without requiring any effort: call it chewing-gum for the brain.
I disagree with the premise that all time spent watching TV is not productive. Even when watching shows which are not directly educational, it is time spent generating a common framework for discussion and discourse, it enables consideration of various hypothetical situations, and enhances the ability of people to consider various possibilities. Unless you consider all art appreciation and cultural achievement, along with most of philosophy, to be not productive in any sense.
You could as easily say "time spent reading is time spent *not* being productive" or "time spent talking about whether an Artificial Intelligence deserves rights and 'personhood' is time spent *not* being productive" -- which could be strictly speaking true (nothing is directly produced) but the indirect effects of those thoughts and discussions and things read, and shows watched can lead to very productive efforts.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.