And by “many years ago”, I mean “before the Internet”. Eep.

Bonus points: Wall-E plagarized / paid homage to some of the plot points.

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I don’t think Shirky is arguing that TV is obsolete, so much as that it has been used to serve a particular cultural purpose (burning intellectual surplus) which may become less necessary as our society finds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.

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.

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.

This is not to say that synergy between the two is a bad thing. I think that most of the truly great games I’ve enjoyed combine both. But the vast majority of people who play games have been trained by years of games where story was not as much of an option (or at least was a discarded one, because of the arcade-games roots) to play them for the challenge and entertainment of the system, not the intellectual and spiritual spark.

It’s worth noting that the kind of games would consider to be story-above-gameplay, like interactive fiction, Sierra-style adventure games, and possibly things like Myst, are essentially descendents of ADVENT, while nearly all other mainstream games are descendents of coin-op arcade games. While those coin-op games may have sprung from the early ‘SPACEWAR’ style games, the whole concept mutated wildly over the 70′s and 80′s while story-style games never had as much development because they were less profitable before the introduction of home computers. In effect, action/twitch nonstory games have had more time to grow up.