Is it really?
What is it with smart academics that can’t resist the urge to tell us whats good and whats bad for us? Or that doing A is better than doing B?
Clay Shirky is one of my heros and a very very clever person and, in principle, his argument of a seismic change in media (from passive consumption to active participation) is spot on.
And as much as I share and support his optimistic vision of future of mass participation and creativity his argument has sometimes more holes than a block of dutch cheese (I don’t know where to start and probably miss some points…anyway…)
Talking about surplus of free time he writes
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms.
Dear Clay….Humans got pissed since they invented booze. And sitcoms have evolved as a cultural form of expression like theater and films before them, NOT as a reaction to a downtime crisis!
And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list.
C’mmon….Downtime is as important today as it always has been if not more considering the fact that the stimulus we’re surrounded with are 100 times greater than in the past. What’smore, TV is only one, albeit the most popular downtime activity tool. So even with all the most convincing mathematical calculations it is rather daft to assume that if people will watch less TV they will start writing more wikipedia articles or produce more LOLcats images - they can do million other things.
To paraphrase one of his calculations (”Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing”) you might argue that instead they will go jogging or the gym - hey, we just solved America’s obesity problem!
Culture production indeed has become a collective endeavor and we only now begin to realise what amazing opportunities we are presented with. But people don’t change. Technology changes, the world changes, but people still are the same - and since the very early days of homo sapiens, in some parts of our daily lives we like and NEED to do nothing. We NEED passive consumption. And occasionally we NEED to get pissed as well…
Whats with that Christian work ethics??? You really should read Tim Hodgkinson
Comments 3
But I wasn’t talking about drunkeness, or about the evolution of sitcoms as a form. I was talking about *amount* of those kinds of consumption, and why in some eras pure consumption spikes.
We watch *far* more TV than we ever watched theater or film. The hard thing to explain is why TV grew to be a 20 hour a week activity. And the answer, in my view, is that we had little else to do with that free time.
I think your central premise is that TV is just one of many activities, and one that is unlikely to be reduced in favor of other activities. The numbers, however, don’t bear that out. TV is *far and away* the largest single time sink of downtime, and it is only in this decade that TV watching has peaked, and is being reduced slightly.
The key point is that even tiny shifts from a monoculture of consumption to a mix of consumption, production, and sharing leads to huge new cultural artifacts and modes of participating. Wikipedia, considered as a measure of effort, is enormous, but considered against the background of TV, is tiny.
And given my praise for Warcraft and lolcats, I think this is hardly Christian work ethics. More like atheist participation ethics, I’d say.
Posted 29 Apr 2008 at 1:36 pm ¶I thought the Gin thing was an oversimplification if not completely misleading. Some nice ideas in there though Asi
Posted 29 Apr 2008 at 2:58 pm ¶Hey Clay - thanks for stopping by!
I guess that my point was that it is a bit of a wishful thinking to assume that if 1% of TV will shift to participative media we’ll have more wikipedia articles or even LOLcats. You will probably have more youtube videos watched….
TV is so huge because it’s the easiest and cheapest form of passive consumption. Additionally, to thik about TV as a unified thing is also problematic.
It will be interesting to see whether for the next generations the consumption, production, and sharing model will be as big as TV is for us or is the 1% rule is rather immovable?
Finally, I’m taking back my Christian work ethics comment…that is indeed a crude accusation for someone who praised Lolcats and WOW
Posted 30 Apr 2008 at 12:33 pm ¶Post a Comment