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

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.