Television

Watching geeks converse, watching/listening to anyone who knows more than I do about something I’m interested in fascinates me.

Last week I posted something from Wired Magazine about how the internet is rewiring our brains. In this Wired Magazine article, tech writers Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink discuss how the internet may also be benefiting society by creating opportunities to spend the cognitive surplus – in other words, a surplus of time to think – which has been on the increase since post-war times.

Shirky: People have had lots of free time for as long as there’s been the industrialized world. But that free time has mainly been something to be used up rather than used, especially in postwar America, with the rise of suburbanization and long commutes. Suddenly we no longer lived in tight-knit communities and therefore we spent less time interacting face-to-face. As a result, we ended up spending the bulk of our free time watching television.

How much time? Well, someone born in 1960 has watched (on average) about 50,000 hours of television, which amounts to more than five and a half solid years.

With that as context, Pink marvels that, “A few days ago, I was talking with someone about Wikipedia. And the guy shook his head dismissively and said about the people who contribute to it: ‘Where do they get the time?’”

Old biases come into play. Television and telephone are legitimate ways to spend time; the internet and social media are not. We forget that TV and telephone were once also new mediums that were frowned upon by those who didn’t grow up in their shadows.

Shirky gives some insight about how television has shaped our culture:

Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about.

Just how much time has been spent on open-source endeavors like Wikipedia? “We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, for example,” says Shirky, “using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor.” 100 million hours. It seems like a lot doesn’t it? It seems like enough to justify questions like “Where do people find the time?” and “Don’t people have better things to do?”

It seems like it until you consider that Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year. 200. Billion. Hours. That means that all the time that people have contributed towards Wikipedia is less than one-tenth of 1% of the total worldwide cognitive surplus.

The moral of the story? There are a few, and you should definitely take the time to read Shirky and Pink’s conversation in it’s entirety here, but the next time someone asks you if you saw the latest episode of some banal TV-show-du-jour, a suitable reply might be, “Who has the time? I was busy spending MY cognitive surplus productively.”