Stop watching TV - we need your brain cycles

Clay Shirky has written an article essentially arguing that TV - the late 20th century opiate of the masses - is no longer having the deadening impact, and we humans are increasingly turning to social media and using our brains.

The article is a twist on the "Economics of Attention" discussion which has run for several years now in the Web-O-Sphere, pointing out that when we start to interact with New Media we start to use our brain cycles again. (In counterpoint of course, there is an argument in the Sunday Times today by Dr Susan Greenfield that computer games and social media are turning this generation into zombies)

The interesting bit of this article to me though, was the discussion around us not understanding how to re-structure our sociaty in the early days to best use the new social capital on offer, and draws parallels to the Industrial Revolution. In essence he argues the thesis put forward that the societal change of the revolution was lubricated by Gin is akin to our TV Opiate...

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

I'm not sure about the accuracy of the boozy bits the way, all the sources I have say that Gin use was declining by the late 1700's when the Revolution was starting off, and the Temperance movement only really kicked in at the latter end of the 19th century. Anyway the discussion re: not having the social institutions to deal with the New Order then being similar to today is valid in my view, thus the argument that we don't know quite what to do yet with everyone weaning themself off TV:

Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

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. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

I think this is directionally correct, even if all those hours watching TV are not directly convertible - if you look at history, every time there is a major shift in technology - especially communication technology - there is a subsequent shift in society that plays out over 2 or 3 generations. Shirky notes:

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. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I could quibble about whether the Netheads watch an average amount of TV, but the point is made - this is a material world change with a fairly small shift

(Addendum - Even if you take into account the 1:9:90 ratio of creators / interactors/ consumers in Social Media, or point made so well on Slashdot:

I don't think that stopping the practice of watching long hours of re-ran Seinfeld episodes, so that you can spend even more hours writing and following links to various discussions and trivia about Seinfeld episodes and looking for places to download bootlegs of the same is an indication that, finally, all of that brainpower is getting put back to productive use

Its clear that it there is some room for growth - unless everyone gets seduced by the TV back catalogues that is )

And its a fascinating area to think about, and an interesting question is other what models of the past shall we use to do so? For what its worth, the one book I found fascinating was The Victorian Internet (about the impact of the Telegraph on society).

(Written while listening to a concert on TV )