Mining the Cognitive Surplus 220
Clay Shirky has been giving talks on his book Here Comes Everybody — his "masterpiece," per Cory Doctorow — and BoingBoing picks up one of them, from the Web 2.0 conference. Shirky has come up with a quantification of the attention that TV has been absorbing for more than half a century. Shirky defines as a unit of attention "the Wikipedia": 100 million person-hours of thought. As a society we have been burning 2,000 Wikipedias per year watching mostly sitcoms. We're stopping now. Here's a video of another information-dense Shirky talk, this one at Harvard.
Fascinating (Score:5, Interesting)
I was going to make a comment about such statistics being next to meaningless. ("What if nobody watched TV" is similar to "what if we didn't have any wars" or "what if all religions suddenly settled their differences"). Then I RTFA. And I'm not entirely convinced but I really hope he's right.
He making a compelling case for the end of the TV era. Can you feel it coming? Just think what it might mean...
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Re:Fascinating (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think that's true. Compare a season of "Heroes" to a season of "A-Team" or "Night Rider". Look at the quality progression of "Star Trek" "Star Trek:the Next Generation" "Battlestar Galactica". I think television quality has migrated towards the extremes, there is some television that is very good, and some that makes Charlie the Unicorn [youtube.com] look brilliant. I'm hoping that the rise of YouTube is going to be the end of reality TV.
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And don't even try to tell me that things like YouTube make TV unnecessary, because if you think TV is shit, it's much, much worse on YouTube. I think I drop an IQ point every time I hit that site.
We post medical education videos on YouTube (Score:3, Interesting)
So, yes, I agree with you that you can't label all of YouTube as bad.
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Prime Time shows, many of them at least, are now heavily serialized. Gone are the glory days of the sitcom; and thank goodness. Sitcoms are okay in small doses (ie Seinfeld) but they are becoming increasingly rare.
If you look at television as a whole, considering all 24 hours of service times all of the channels, then yea, there's usually nothing good on TV. B
yeah the web has totally changed this (Score:3, Insightful)
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And I'm not entirely convinced but I really hope he's right.
He's right and his proof was made before he wrote the article, evidenced by the existence of Wikipedia itself. For this one project alone, 1/10,000 of the cognitive surplus of one year has already been harvested.
He['s] making a compelling case for the end of the TV era.
One can only hope. The TV is last century technology. It brought information into the collective consciousness. Computers and the internet will likely prove to be as powerful this century.
His major point is that TV is a 1-way collective technology while computers are a 2-way collective techno
Re:Fascinating (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, do you even know what the word "proof" means? Your statement isn't based on any kind of fact so it may not even be true itself, much less prove anything else.
The article is based on two whopping unfounded assumptions:
- That this cognitive surplus even exists. It's possible that people simply have a finite amount of thought available per unit time and that this thought is already being completely expended. The fact that people in the past had much less free time is meaningless; they also had much less requirement for thought in their work and in their lives. Maybe a consequence of the move from mindless drones to modern thought-workers is that there isn't much thought left to be used in the free time created.
- That mental effort is interchangeable. This should be obviously false, not just unproven. It should be clear to anyone who has interacted with humans that when any kind of goal is at stake, some people's brains are vastly more effective at reaching it than others. If your goal is some physics problem, an hour of Albert Einstein's brain is probably worth more than the entire lifetime of that girl who made me a sandwich at the deli today. You can't say that there are X person-hours being wasted in front of the TV which could do awesome things if they were put to use elsewhere. These are not CPU cycles, you can't just load new software and go.
Now, overall I think that the guy's talk has a good point and tells a lot of truth. But it goes too far when talking about mental effort as if it were fungible, and there's no way that any of his conclusions are proven at all, much less by the mere existence of Wikipedia.
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You are proof of this!
Re:Fascinating (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree and I'd go further to say that any human thought that does not lead to productive action is useless in the context of making some point about any 'cognitive surplus' lost to TV viewing.
What's the difference if a construction worker spends his free
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Don't forget the problem of "50% of the people are below average" I don't mean that as any kind of insult, just an observation of reality. When you are talking about global scale projects like Wikipedia, the contributions that make it a valuable resource are the ones that come from people with expertise. That severely limits the number of people who can contribute meaningfully, a sort of self enforcing version of the adage "20% of the people d
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Don't forget the problem of "50% of the people are below average" I don't mean that as any kind of insult, just an observation of reality.
Yes, but the number of people who can make a contribution of any value depends on the tightness of that distribution. If it is possible to generate a measurement of "potential to contribute", I suspect the distribution of it would be fairly tight, especially if you measure intelligence using the greatest possible parameter space. For instance, what might be the metric to determine how greatly someone can contribute to the site colourlovers.com [colourlovers.com]? How does one weight this metric with others, such as mathemat
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You could as easily say "time
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I think I see your point. I wonder how the gradual merging of audio/visual media (we know as cable and broadcast TV) with the internet will do for the 50% you speak of? One assumes that they will just access the same alpha state-inducing 'content' via the web as they do on traditional TV.
I guess if we take your statement further, ther
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It's possible that people simply have a finite amount of thought available per unit time and that this thought is already being completely expended
Have you ever been compelled to work when you would rather have been watching TV? Did the additional work retroactively destroy earlier work?
More to the point, surely the amount of time you engage in non-passive activities varies over both short and long term intervals. For example, many watch more TV in the summer than during the school year. Does the ability to toil diminish in the summer? You could argue that students would burn out without a multiple month vacation - but summer break doesn't exist
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Seriously, do you even know what the word "proof" means?
From American Heritage: evidence or argument helping to establish a fact or truth of a statement.
My reference to the existence of wikipedia, though not fulfilling the rigorous mathematical definition of "proof" you learned in geometry class, does fulfill the first definition in American Heritage as I have used it (note the word "argument" in the AH definition). Perhaps you should look up words in the dictionary before you attack people for using them improperly. Of course a better policy would be to res
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TV lets you switch gears from what you did all day. I don't know anybody who works all day in an office who wants to come home and... do more office stuff. You need to switch gears. People used to work in the field or factory all day, then come home and read. Now that we read all day, we w
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It's possible that people simply have a finite amount of thought available per unit time and that this thought is already being completely expended.
No, that's not possible at all, aside from the pedantic (and useless) sense that "even one in a trillion trillion trillion means it's *possible*".
That mental effort is interchangeable.
That's not what he's saying at all. He's not saying that there would be X more wikipedias, or anything else *specific*, just that there would be X more *somethings* of roughly a "wikipedia amount of effort".
Now, overall I think that the guy's talk has a good point and tells a lot of truth. But it goes too far when talking about mental effort as if it were fungible, and there's no way that any of his conclusions are proven at all, much less by the mere existence of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is just an example. The point is, though, that time spent watching television is pretty much universally unproductive.
So if you replace the time s
TFA's still full of it (Score:3, Insightful)
1. As others already pointed out, you _can't_ do mental work for 16 hours a day and still be top-productivity. And the GP's post isn't just "possible", it's actually proven.
I remember at least one study where some students were asked to solve some complicated maths problems. Some were told to take a break, get a good night's sleep, etc. Some were told to forge ahead, keep at it all day, and generally do the kind of 16 hours a day mental work that TFA implicitly assumes possible
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The Internet is obviously important, and computers are already at least as "powerful" as a medium for communication.
I just don't see why both can't continue to co-exist. At the end of the day, I want to relax, sit comfortably on the couch, and watch some TV before I go to bed. I don't want to crouch in front of a computer screen all the time, and I don't want an interactive exp
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I suppose if it was the right girl, and she happened to have an island fetish...maybe.
Can you get laid meeting people on the Internet?
Well, yes, duh. But it'll be a 45-year-old FBI agent pretending to be that hawtie sweet-16 camgirl.
Re: If we must watch TV... (Score:2)
Nope.
No more waiting (wasting!) an entire week for an episode, then as it plays sitting through 22 minutes of commercials.
If you can't stand to be serious and must relax, then burn one day, watch 9 episodes in 7 hours, and put the next 8 weeks to your previously scheduled productive activity.
Re:Fascinating (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that it makes any difference whether we waste our time on soap operas or getting epix though.
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This gives me an idea.
Imagine a massively multi-player online environment that seems to be a game... but it is not really a game. What it actually is, is a collec
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Perhaps if war was precipitated by populations having convictions and desires that ran contrary to other (usually neighboring) countries.
More often than not however, modern wars have been carefully and deliberately started as a strategic tool by governments independent of their citizens' wishes, using willing arms dealers that stand to make a lot of money out of the conflict (and p
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Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm certainly not going to debate that, and that's not my contention, here. I'm talking about the assertion that time spent online is somehow, by its nature, more productive than the time spent catching a broadcast or TiVo'd session of a sitcom. People want to be entertained, and they're going to find ways to spend time being entertained. From what I'm able to determine - anecdotally, of course - the generations that most recently grew up sitting in f
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People want to be entertained
And there's nothing wrong with that. He thinks the "surplus" of time we have (beyond what's required to fill basic needs) should be used to create more knowledge. A lot of people--most, it seems--have voted with their behavior and decided that they'd rather use that "surplus" time to entertain themselves.
The point of human existence isn't just the creation of more knowledge. Sure, all else being equal, an activity that creates more knowledge is better than one that creates less. But, being entertained
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Re:Double-standards? (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to watch 2 hours of TV a night (which I believe is below the American average), and felt that after a hard day of work, it was nice to relax and just absorb for a while. But after recently giving up caffeine, I decided to see how many of my other "normal" activities were based on addiction too. So I gave up an hour of TV and tried to put it towards other uses (in this case, re-doing my office).
The first week was fine, the second week was hell, but by the end of the first month, I was actually adapted to not watching more than an hour every day. I had moved past working on my office, and was writing books again, debugging old code I hadn't touched in months. I had been ignoring productivity to indulge in something I could SWORN was essential to my mental stability.
I'm actually torn about this situation, because I make my living producing entertainment products that I hope people will mindlessly consume... but if we actually DO move beyond the old-fashioned paradigm, the hours I produce may have a harder time fitting into the "free time" the rest of the world has.
Someone should put some of their newly-acquired brainspace into finding a way to make TV more socially-and-interactively useful, so I don't have to worry so much.
Re:Double-standards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why be torn? There will NEVER be a shortage of people ready to gobble mindless entertainment. What you do as a self-aware person doesn't mean fuck all to the drones, so make stuff that makes money for you and then enjoy the
power money gives you. You cannot (no one can) ensmarten the drones. Leave them to their American Idol and other comforting bullshit. They don't care what you want.
"Someone should put some of their newly-acquired brainspace into finding a way to make TV more socially-and-interactively useful, so I don't have to worry so much."
They did. It's called a computer.
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So how can you help make the entertainment products you create the kind of products that a selective consumer would choose to put in their one hour of $MINDLESS_ENTERTAINMENT a day? What distinguishes the sho
Re: Books vs TV (Score:2)
I think the trick is that TV is guaged at a level of "Here I am with the remote... is there *something* worth staying here for, or is *all* of it so bad I have to shut it off?"
I am a very enthusiastic reader, and 95% of my books are better chosen with a theme than TV's forced selection.
Also, I find that books create their own fatigue indicator. If I'm ti
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I have to agree. To me, sitting in front of the TV for hours on end is exactly the same as throwing some random TV-programmer schmuck the keys to my brain and saying "Here, you drive for a while". No thanks.
A couple of years ago I decided to selectively watch only the TV programs that *really* engage my attention. Shows that I feel li
Re:Double-standards? (Score:5, Insightful)
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write
draw
code
compose
sing
for its own sake. Make the world a little more interesting than it was five minutes ago, even if you're the only one who ever sees the results.
Especially since (Score:3, Insightful)
Then, of course, there's the problem of assuming t
Wow (Score:3, Funny)
My hippy-social-justice-queer-tree-hugging-dirt-worshipper self just did a little dance.
I would have RTFA... (Score:2)
Actually, I haven't had TV since January, and other than the Science Channel, I don't really miss it.
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Dangerous because A) it is 97% an expression of negativity... they tear-down all the right things but their ability to inform about positive trends and potentials is close to zero; and B) its still too much of a passive experience, where I am supposed to sit through stuff I already know because of the cute faces/personalities on display.
On the whole, I
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Maybe, maybe not (Score:3, Insightful)
I also think that it's a good thing a lot of these folks have the TV to watch. It gives them something to talk about, and keeps them inside, out of trouble. I don't think the infinite number of monkeys technique really applies to advancing human thought. If they're captivated by sitcoms, it's doubtful they are going to have much to contribute.
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(How the heck did you get modded offtopic?)
I think part of his argument is that new things are coming along that are fundamentally different from TV ... even if they appeal at the same level of sophistication.
The difference being that they're interactive; and, however slowly, people might start to build something.
Eh. Who knows?
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If the quality of the most popular TV shows right now is any indication...the thought of that something scares the shit out of me.
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So, get people to explain them to you. People love talking about their favorite shows. This is exactly what I do. I've been without TV since 1991 and I've never really felt out of the loop. If all your conversations must revolve around TV then that's a little limiting in itself. Reading a few blogs and news web sites is more than enough to keep you in the running with pop culture.
Many will defend various programs on TV and they may
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Re:Maybe, maybe not (Score:4, Insightful)
I have an endless store of engineering trivia, others have an endless supply of pop culture trivia. It's not good, bad, or otherwise.
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Unfortunately, I've discovered a new problem recently. I find my time dwindling again because in the last couple years, I've been spending way too much time online. While pre-93 I might surf channels all day hoping something good would
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I wasn't trying to say TV makes you stupid. I was saying that TV is a good way to keep stupid people out of trouble, and stupid people don't have much to contribute intellectually.
See what happened when you quit watching and went on the internet?
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I'm also a TV refusenik, and while I don't know if the GP is like me, I do know I don't go around willy nilly saying "I don't watch TV". It comes up from time to time when someone alludes to something I've never seen, so I'll have to ask for clarification, but I'm n
Interesting Analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.tiara.org/blog/?p=272 [tiara.org]
I think the take-home message is that most people don't want to contribute much. The reason is obvious to me - after 40+ hours of working in a week, most people I know want to relax and not think much; passively watching TV is the perfect outlet.
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That analysis addresses a different question (Score:2)
To make the claims you're making, you need to look at the overall behavior of individual people across all the si
Just kinda stopped watching.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The most interesting thing is this is something that just sort of happened.. not something I set out to do. I think my cat might spend more time in front of the TV than I do.
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Don't forget Bit Torrent. Every TV show on the air is available that way now. The problem is, even when the stuff is available for free I don't have much interest.
I've found pretty much the same thing happening to me. We have a big screen TV, but we really only use it for watching movies (Netflix, as it happens.) Broadcast TV programming is, by and large, worthless and what good stuff there i
Amusing ourselves to death (Score:3, Interesting)
1. He's right.
2. He is pissing in the wind.
The Internet, and in particular Web 2.0 and the interactive/collaborative opportunities it creates, have pretty much already been coopted into the trivialization of thought and discourse. For every Wikipedia article there are hundreds of lame blog posts on boneheaded topics (including, for some of you, this one!). From an epistomological perspective, the Internet/television convergence is only accelerated by Web 2.0 technology, because the medium conditions us to behave trivially, a sizable fraction of people like it that way, and the economics of the medium tend to reinforce and extend that use.
The interested reader may also want to check out Neil Postmans's magnum opus [amazon.com] on the death blow television has administered to our public discourse, written some twenty years ago.
Participation is valuable regardless of content (Score:2)
Postman has a tendency towards technological determinism. It is not necessarily fruitful to treat the Internet as a single medium, and it's certainly not a medium whose social significance has stabilized yet. At this point, the convergence with TV that you talk about is only one possible outcome - one that must be vigorously resisted.
That said, you are right to focus on the effects online activity have on people, rather than the relative value of the content they produce. Participation online can help
Post Inducer (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Post Inducer (Score:5, Interesting)
I was thinking of posting anonymously because everyone agreeing with TFA is getting systematically modded down. But I'm going to stick my neck out on this one.
I think many people on this forum hope that they are the only ones who know how to type or make any sort of meaningful contribution on line. This is painful arrogance. I see a lot of: (1) "the statistics are meaningless" and (2) "most people are stupid and can contribute nothing" comments here. It gets redundant watching people who measure their IQ as a function inverse of their slashdot id.
The thing that escape those with this arrogance, though, is that everyone is able to contribute online. Every thought that comes out of people is a contribution to the collective consciousness, even if you make redundant groupthink posts on slashdot. Although a handful of websites (e.g. slashdot) pioneered online collaborative thought, they will not forever remain the only legitimate sources of such. For example, how many people have solved a programming or computer administration problem from a poorly written post by someone who "knew less" than themselves? I suspect many, although it may be tough for these individuals to admit.
good missed points (Score:5, Interesting)
This reminded me of seeing Esther Dyson and some pundits on Charley Rose a couple of years ago. They all laughed when Dyson said: "I can't tell you what web 2.0 means". Web 2.04 (or wherever we're at) means everyone can be Esther Dyson, everyone can be Charley Rose. Not everyone can be Tom Friedman as it takes years to acquire the ego involved in that much stupidity. Now is everyone going to be Charley Rose? No. Will there still be old school one way media? Yes, at least for a long time.
Mander's point is that TV is passive and active participation works the brain muscles more than then passive staring at the screen. The brain is a muscle, use it or lose it. As someone who quit TV, not unlike drugs, in my teen years I've long argued that TV was the reason for the collapse of literacy in the US. Will the wide open web cure that? Probably not, we shall see, but any change is good. American pop culture, mainstream corporate entertainment, now resembles a piece of chewing gum so worked over there is no flavor left (see: pop music). Are endless sectarian/technical blog exchanges entertaining? YMMV, but compared to what's on TV and the radio they at least measure up.
a lot of web 2.0 is passive media, though (Score:2)
Tried it already (Score:5, Insightful)
I had been wasting time playing video games. I decided about 3 weeks ago that I wasn't going to spend my time doing things that have no outcome and only serve as time sinks: no video games, no pot smoking, no TV watching(unless it's informative). Exceptions (like social events) do exist, but I've stuck to it.
Since then, I put time into my senior seminar and it ended up kicking ass, done a whole semester's worth of math in about 4 straight days, greatly increased my guitar playing ability, learned to meditate, and learned a new programming language. I've also taken care of loads of smaller things I may have just ignored and come closer to some friends and family. Most of this great success is due to the fact that I've eliminated my biggest time sink (video games). I imagine I'll also have more money, since video games are expensive and I'm selling my X360.
These changes have allowed me to come closer to my full potential, and I don't regret it one bit. For me, video games took hours (years?) of time that I'll never get back, but at least I'm young enough that it's not too late. I feel like I just woke up from a coma.
I strongly encourage everyone to examine his time-sinking habits and eliminate them; it may change your life!
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Re:Tried it already (Score:4, Insightful)
You can also find more productive ways of slacking off, if that makes any sense. For instance, my guilty vice is South Park, so I loaded up the latest episode today and watched it while I was on an elliptical machine in the gym(with a set of wireless headphones). I was able to watch the episode and workout at the same time.
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Burnout sucks.... and if you're "working" for 12+ Hours a day, it can very easily happen.
If I get back from work at 9PM, it's fairly therapeutic to relax and unwind by sitting down and watching an hour or so of TV. Similarly, gathering a few friends every week to watch Lost (or whatever other serial happens to be fashionable at the moment) is a great excuse to socialize.
Interestingly, I lived above the arctic circle last summer, and found that t
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If I could just get rid of slashdot...
Too bad there is no option in my preferences page to block myself from logging in? I have tried putting 127.0.0.1 in my etc/hosts but I eventually realized slashdot will resolve anything, asdf.slashdot.org still works!
More of this nonsense? (Score:2)
When he shows a cause-effect relationship between pretty much ANYTHING and his new "unit", or anything useful that is in reality easily calculable using this unit, I might start listening.
We should spend all our collective mental energy (Score:2)
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. (Score:2, Insightful)
Get your cognitive surplus here! (Score:2)
A Modern Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Somehow there's an expectation that people should use every waking moment to do something "productive". The best example of this trend are Blackberries and how they so often are used to extend one's working hours to to every single free moment we had left.
Especially in Anglo-Saxon societies, people are expected to work continuously, eat at their desks,have no breaks and take work home with them - it's nuts: half the mid-level decision makers seem to be in a constant state of overstressed exhaustion, so no wonder overall corporate productivity is low, wrong decisions are common and a state of barely contained chaos is the rule. Nobody is thinking of the big picture - they're all keeping up with the flow of data (95% worthless chaff) and running around putting out fires.
And now this article
This is totally against the way the brain works - people absolutely need some sort of mental "decompression" time. Passive consumption of intellectually-undemanding TV entertainment is a form of relaxation and release from everyday stress.
Television might be crap, but it serves a purpose - entertainment without requiring any effort: call it chewing-gum for the brain.
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However, 1e8 person * hours is an incredibly bad choice for the definition of a Wikipedia. Why not make it more metric, defining it to be something like 1 person * second of attention? Then the SI standard unit would be a megawikipedia, or MWp. This is equivalent to one person studying something for one and a half weeks, or all of America witnessing an ev
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Wait. Huh? Thought pattern flew off elsewhere... meant to say "It's two different things being measured".
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This did occur before the industrial revolution... perhaps theres a connection here?