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.

Comments

Fascinating

[26199]

I was going to make a comment about such statistics being next to meaningless. ("What if nobody watched TV" is similar to "what if we didn't have any wars" or "what if all religions suddenly settled their differences"). Then I RTFA. And I'm not entirely convinced but I really hope he's right.

He making a compelling case for the end of the TV era. Can you feel it coming? Just think what it might mean...

Re:Fascinating

[ceoyoyo]

I agree with you he has an interesting point, but he's built it up in the wrong direction. People are not machines. You can't just work them all the time. They either die earlier, work less effectively or go insane.

TV lets you switch gears from what you did all day. I don't know anybody who works all day in an office who wants to come home and... do more office stuff. You need to switch gears. People used to work in the field or factory all day, then come home and read. Now that we read all day, we want to come home and do something different.

There are a few people who can go home and write decent blogs, or make good videos of things. A few. MOST of them tend to be either professionals (ie it's at least partly their job, the the article author), or they do it fairly short term and, if it doesn't become their job, they stop or at least slow down a lot.

I think he's got a point about the ads. They really are wasted. They don't help your mental recuperation and they certainly aren't productive.

Plus I don't know anyone who actually sits in front of the TV drooling. My TV is on, but I'm reading Slashdot and about to go do the dishes. My father was a teacher and used to mark in front of the TV. I know lots of people who turn the TV on and then have a nap.

Re:Nope.

[ScentCone]

Entertainment isn't directly supposed to be productive

I'm certainly not going to debate that, and that's not my contention, here. I'm talking about the assertion that time spent online is somehow, by its nature, more productive than the time spent catching a broadcast or TiVo'd session of a sitcom. People want to be entertained, and they're going to find ways to spend time being entertained. From what I'm able to determine - anecdotally, of course - the generations that most recently grew up sitting in front of the TV and talking on land-lines with their peers are indeed different than the ones that are spending the same (or, I'd guess, wildly more) hours sitting in front of MySpace and IMing their friends. But only in trivial ways. And worse, actually - at least people who sat through a 30-minute sitcome narrative actually had their brains involved in following a story arc, however silly it might have been. The ADHD-ness of how that same time is now being spent is dramatically visible, and might even worsen the sort of productivity that comes from being able to concentrate for more than 30 seconds at a time on any one thing.

Interesting Analysis

[rm999]

This is an interesting analysis of the distribution of users who contribute online:
http://www.tiara.org/blog/?p=272

I think the take-home message is that most people don't want to contribute much. The reason is obvious to me - after 40+ hours of working in a week, most people I know want to relax and not think much; passively watching TV is the perfect outlet.

Just kinda stopped watching..

[xtal]

I noticed a few months ago, I don't watch TV anymore. I'll buy DVDs and sit down and watch them, but there is too much interesting stuff going on now, and too many other things to do to sit there on the couch. Most of the programs are utterly asinine, and the good nuggets are all available through other media (DVD) now.

The most interesting thing is this is something that just sort of happened.. not something I set out to do. I think my cat might spend more time in front of the TV than I do.

Amusing ourselves to death

[Reader X]

Two things about Clay Shirky's critique of TV:

1. He's right.
2. He is pissing in the wind.

The Internet, and in particular Web 2.0 and the interactive/collaborative opportunities it creates, have pretty much already been coopted into the trivialization of thought and discourse. For every Wikipedia article there are hundreds of lame blog posts on boneheaded topics (including, for some of you, this one!). From an epistomological perspective, the Internet/television convergence is only accelerated by Web 2.0 technology, because the medium conditions us to behave trivially, a sizable fraction of people like it that way, and the economics of the medium tend to reinforce and extend that use.

The interested reader may also want to check out Neil Postmans's magnum opus on the death blow television has administered to our public discourse, written some twenty years ago.

Post Inducer

[Al Mutasim]

Doesn't that essay make you want to post comments to Slashdot, rather than just read? It does me.

Re:Post Inducer

[LaskoVortex]

I was thinking of posting anonymously because everyone agreeing with TFA is getting systematically modded down. But I'm going to stick my neck out on this one.

I think many people on this forum hope that they are the only ones who know how to type or make any sort of meaningful contribution on line. This is painful arrogance. I see a lot of: (1) "the statistics are meaningless" and (2) "most people are stupid and can contribute nothing" comments here. It gets redundant watching people who measure their IQ as a function inverse of their slashdot id.

The thing that escape those with this arrogance, though, is that everyone is able to contribute online. Every thought that comes out of people is a contribution to the collective consciousness, even if you make redundant groupthink posts on slashdot. Although a handful of websites (e.g. slashdot) pioneered online collaborative thought, they will not forever remain the only legitimate sources of such. For example, how many people have solved a programming or computer administration problem from a poorly written post by someone who "knew less" than themselves? I suspect many, although it may be tough for these individuals to admit.

good missed points

[opencity]

Jerry Mander's book from the 70s made a crucial distinction between active and passive media. The above slashdot comments seem limited to wikipedia bashing or a splitting of web 2.0 hairs re:2008. That is, the percentage that are coherent, which is low by the usually high standards of non technical commentary on this site ... cough ...

This reminded me of seeing Esther Dyson and some pundits on Charley Rose a couple of years ago. They all laughed when Dyson said: "I can't tell you what web 2.0 means". Web 2.04 (or wherever we're at) means everyone can be Esther Dyson, everyone can be Charley Rose. Not everyone can be Tom Friedman as it takes years to acquire the ego involved in that much stupidity. Now is everyone going to be Charley Rose? No. Will there still be old school one way media? Yes, at least for a long time.

Mander's point is that TV is passive and active participation works the brain muscles more than then passive staring at the screen. The brain is a muscle, use it or lose it. As someone who quit TV, not unlike drugs, in my teen years I've long argued that TV was the reason for the collapse of literacy in the US. Will the wide open web cure that? Probably not, we shall see, but any change is good. American pop culture, mainstream corporate entertainment, now resembles a piece of chewing gum so worked over there is no flavor left (see: pop music). Are endless sectarian/technical blog exchanges entertaining? YMMV, but compared to what's on TV and the radio they at least measure up.

Re:Double-standards?

[MrAndrews]

While I'd agree with you that there needs to be some downtime to help refresh one's brainpower, I think the question of "how much downtime" is the key.

I used to watch 2 hours of TV a night (which I believe is below the American average), and felt that after a hard day of work, it was nice to relax and just absorb for a while. But after recently giving up caffeine, I decided to see how many of my other "normal" activities were based on addiction too. So I gave up an hour of TV and tried to put it towards other uses (in this case, re-doing my office).

The first week was fine, the second week was hell, but by the end of the first month, I was actually adapted to not watching more than an hour every day. I had moved past working on my office, and was writing books again, debugging old code I hadn't touched in months. I had been ignoring productivity to indulge in something I could SWORN was essential to my mental stability.

I'm actually torn about this situation, because I make my living producing entertainment products that I hope people will mindlessly consume... but if we actually DO move beyond the old-fashioned paradigm, the hours I produce may have a harder time fitting into the "free time" the rest of the world has.

Someone should put some of their newly-acquired brainspace into finding a way to make TV more socially-and-interactively useful, so I don't have to worry so much.

Re:Maybe, maybe not

[anagama]

Same here -- I gave up TV around 1993. I know exactly what you mean about being disconnected from pop culture but it hasn't really bothered me. After a few months without TV, I didn't miss it all because I had time to engage in hobbies and other things that interested me.

Unfortunately, I've discovered a new problem recently. I find my time dwindling again because in the last couple years, I've been spending way too much time online. While pre-93 I might surf channels all day hoping something good would come on -- now I'm surfing the web incessantly hoping there will be something good to read. I have to figure out how to restrain myself somehow, but this time it will be harder. I need a network connection to get linux distros and for help/documentation. Secondly, commercial free quality material is quite easy to get now thanks to DVDs, iTunes, and such. While my interests are very narrow in terms of TV content, I'm probably spending three or four hours per week on watching shows now. I'm really starting to notice how projects I have are languishing, and projects I want to do are being pushed further into the future.

Anyway -- I better get the heck of slashdot now and start my network time reduction.

Re:Tried it already

[77Punker]

My standard for productive things here is pretty liberal; smoking a joint and playing guitar for three hours can count as productive because I'm getting better at something that exists in real life. Also, maybe I could play with my dog or ride my bike. I guess the point of my original post was that playing video games by myself usually doesn't do anything to make me a better person or improve my life or the world around me. All that happens is that I lose valuable time inside a world that doesn't exist. I'm pretty much always a nice person, so anything I do to interact with the world around me is probably going to improve it somehow, so I should do pretty much anything besides playing video games.

We post medical education videos on YouTube

[KWTm]

Our medical group has created a number of short video clips for educating our patients on various relevant health and health care topics, and is posting them on YouTube. We figure it's an easy way to disseminate knowledge to the general population.

So, yes, I agree with you that you can't label all of YouTube as bad.