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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 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...
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?
Just wow.
My hippy-social-justice-queer-tree-hugging-dirt-worshipper self just did a little dance.
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.
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.
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.
..don't panic
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.
No, no, a Library of Congress is a measurement of information quantity, and a Wikipedia is a measurement of attention; the dimensions are not equal at all.
However, 1e8 person * hours is an incredibly bad choice for the definition of a Wikipedia. Why not make it more metric, defining it to be something like 1 person * second of attention? Then the SI standard unit would be a megawikipedia, or MWp. This is equivalent to one person studying something for one and a half weeks, or all of America witnessing an event that lasts a third of a second.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Doesn't that essay make you want to post comments to Slashdot, rather than just read? It does me.
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.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
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!
- 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
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.
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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.
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.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]