Sorry to break the regular silence.
A quick note to say I’ll be speaking at Futuresonic. Say hello, etc. I really should work out the 3 positions I’m meant to take. They’ll probably take the form of “what I did on my holiday”.
Also, I wonder about the generally euphoric reception of Clay’s talk at Web 2.0, stating that, paraphrasing, if we just stopped watching a little TV, we could spend that time doing something more useful. We could build thousands of Wikipedias.
A few thoughts come to mind: I’m a bit shocked at the general protestant work ethic undercurrents. It’s not a cognitive surplus; it’s a way of coping. The real question is why these people are creating Wikipedia when they could be sleeping instead. We’re processing hundreds, if not thousands of times more information per day than previous humans – how are we meant to make sense of it all if we have no downtime?
There’s also a weird anti-consumption spin. Nothing is worth creating if it isn’t consumed (yes, yes, there’s gain in the process of making, or craft, also). What about if all those people reading Wikipedia spent their time writing it instead? The ratio of active to passive users, consumers to creators, will always be high, and may be pretty immutable, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It would be great if people did create more, and especially felt empowered to create, change, edit, curate, but we can’t expect them to do that without consumption and reflection. Time spent on the Internet (mainly consumption, remember) is overtaking that spent watching TV in some countries/certain segments – is that time really better spent because you’re clicking on things?
I’m a big fan of TV, too. I find it a flimsy argument that grinding in World of Warcraft, watching Youtube videos, or I dunno, playing Sim City for 40 hours straight (Spore is going to kill me) is in any way better than watching TV, merely because it’s ‘doing something’. There’s good TV, and bad TV, but I refuse to even make a value judgement of bad TV being worse than good computer games or web browsing. It’s just leisure activity. Passing the time. Taking a break. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. You might even learn something in the process.
And I like gin. More gin! Gin.
You MUST break the silence more often, you old salt. It’s easy to take Clay’s position (a friend, I’d say, if in spirit if not in, you know material experiences of hoisting pints in the same bar, etc) if you’re a prolific Clay-kind of person. Insightful grumble — great stuff. Wish I were going to be there for the talk! Do capture it to share!
— Julian Bleecker 29.04.08 #
A great post – keep them coming!
A recent Forrester study showed that TV viewing has remained constant over the past 4 years while Internet consumption has continued to increase. So, as you rightly point out, the Wikipedia creations are eating into our non-sedentary leisure time – sleep, leaving the house etc – and not from us spending less time in front of the tube
Cheers
Simon
I’m glad you’ve said this. I had the same thoughts as I was reading it and the coverage it has gotten this week. Social media has hit any cognitive surplus with a hammer, and fragmented it all over. I look at the idea of cognitive surplus like highways – the greater our throughput capacity, the more we will put through it. This is not a period of focused production we are entering. More like a shift back toward more gin consumption. Or maybe that’s me projecting ;0
— Scott Smith 29.04.08 #
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