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Gin, sitcoms and the debate over the cognitive surplus by kaitlin  on May 16, 2008 - 12:26 PM read 2249 times
Source: http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/16/gin-s... |
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Clay Shirky gave a speech at a Web 2.0 conference a few weeks ago that made an entertaining connection between societal transformations in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 19th century, there was a sudden shift from rural to urban life that was so wrenching that scores of people needed to drink heavily to cope - gin as the critical technology for the industrial revolution. Only after the “collective bender” did people wake up and build the “institutional structures” we associate with the industrial revolution today - he lists libraries, museums, democracy, broad education.
As you could probably guess from the title of this post, Shirky then claims that the sitcom is the 20th century equivilent of gin. Underlying this argument is that shortly after WW II a whole whack of people suddenly found themselves with a lot of free time - something they’d never had to manage before. In turn, they panicked and watched sitcoms for 50 years or so. He then goes on to effectively argue that, as a society, we are coming out of the collective “bender” - of 200 Billion hours a year watching TV in the U.S. alone - to use that “free time” for something more productive. The age of participation.
I don’t want to go too much further into his details then that, but rather stay at this level and focus on whatis becoming one of the more interesting questions of the day. (more…)
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