I have spent a lot of time thinking about television and it’s impact on society. It is no secret that I feel Americans waste too much time watching inane television shows instead of producing something worth while, but I have never been able to crystallize my thoughts on the subject. Enter Clay Shirky. In a post titled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus Clay delves into a comparison between our cultures addiction to TV and England’s addiction to Gin at the turn of the century.
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
Today’s society is at the tail end of another revolution, the free time revolution.
Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
Now that we are waking up from our television bender we are finding ways to use our free time that don’t include watching TV.
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.
I find this line of thought refreshing. For years I have thought myself weird for disliking television. I would expound for hours to my friends and family on TV’s addictive nature, it’s time wasting ability, and it’s overall mind destroying lineup of shows, only to have them nod numbly then happily return to their addiction once my rant was over. (I should note there are a few people who agree with my thought process and have actively sought to reduce or eliminate TV from their lives, but most of them don’t.)
After reading Clay’s post I see that I am not weird. Instead I am one of the next generation who don’t see TV as cool or even entertaining. They see it as broken. Why? Because TV is about consumption only, whether it be thoughts, ideas or products. Whereas the other great medium of communication, the Internet, is about consuming, producing and sharing those same thoughts, ideas and products.
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
If this is true, if our culture is shifting from a consumer mentality to a sharing and producing mentality, then I am no weirdo, I am an innovator. I like the sound of that, innovator. I can proudly say I am innovator instead of some weirdo who doesn’t watch TV. 
Are you ready to be an innovator and forego some television time to produce and share your creations?
- Sean
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