Is television a waste of time? Yes… but, perhaps, a waste badly needed during the years it has taken for society to reinvent itself. A steam-valve for the volcanic birth of the Information Age.
In this insightful essay on social surplus, Clay Shirky argues that our the hours liberated by the microwave and the washing machine may yet fuel a radical transformation. If so, television has been the cocoon, a blanketing layer of wool that has insulated us through a period of vulnerable non-viability.
5 Comments
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing the link.
You and Andrew both linked to this today, which I find interesting. I read the article and feel like I’m missing something since I found it rather unimpressive. All I extracted from reading it is that people have always been seeking to numb their brain and will continue to do so. The only point raised is that soon people will be seeking to do so on the Net rather then just through the TV.
I’m skeptical of the merits of everyone producing and sharing… Not saying it shouldn’t be done, just pointing out that wonderful fabulous things aren’t just going to happen when they start doing so. As an inhabitant of my own little plot of blog-space, I know what I’m putting out does not enrich the world around me and often is as un-productive as watching TV.
Anyway, guess I just felt like raining on a parade. There is good to be had with the powers of the Internet, but it seems like it’s still only going to be well utilized by that small percentage of motivated folks who have always existed.
Hello Sithel,
Certainly the article rests on the assumption that global collaboration must produce something incredible, eventually; and already has, in the form of - for example - Wikipedia.
Even if, as you say, only the motivated will contribute, the article suggests that this “mere 1%” of the population could create the equivalent of 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year. Compare the value of such things to what those same people might have produced before collaborative projects such as Wikipedia existed - many would be frustrated writers and artists with limited audiences.
I’ll be the first to agree that much of what gets produced on the Internet - like much of what gets produced in print, but often sans editing - is crap. That said, I’d be willing to bet that you’ve benefited greatly from others’ free time.
Don’t get me wrong: our culture does have issues with the age/class/wealth barriers of the digital divide. Until we can start to resolve this, true mass collaboration will remain an ideal. But already some of the stuff that’s appearing seems pretty interesting to me, where hodgepodges of interested people can create sources of information that are often more authoritative and valuable than the official channels.
What about the fact that some TV series are actually excellent works of art? Is Shirky going to argue that film is an obsolescent medium because it’s non-interactive too? How about literature? Painting?
Fair point, Alex. Any gross generalization about a medium is, well, gross. Also, in every established medium that I can think of, the proportion of crap to excellence is extreme - so TV is no different there.
However, TV is different in the cumulative amount of time that Americans spend engaging with it. Even film doesn’t approach it (and with things like HBO, that line is blurred).
I don’t think Shirky is arguing that TV is obsolete, so much as that it has been used to serve a particular cultural purpose (burning intellectual surplus) which may become less necessary as our society finds uses for that brainpower, and it ceases to be a surplus at all.