Now I’m off to consume my daily 32/16th of an ounce.

Cheers.

Secondly I don’t understand why it is so important what we do with our time.

Also we can’t say that just because a person watches a very large amount of Tv that a person is less intelligent or less creative.

At the end of the day most of us know the different between what is very good and what is extremely bad. On the internet or on the Tv, also the fact that they say people are watching less Tv is not necessarily true because most of what you can see on tv, you can see on the internet as well. It’s more convenient to watch your favourite sitcom or movie on your pc while checking your email…

Of course there are far more choices on the internet and watching home videos is actually quite entertaining, after all reading blogs and watching vlogs can be comforting, knowing people have the same problems or agree with your point on a certain debate.

Being a 16 year old girl, I watch a large amount of Tv, most of it being The Simpsons, futurama and programmes about extremely fat people. How ever I own 230 books and have read thousands thanks to the local library, I see it just like watching a TV inside my head.

Its just harder to find a book that pleases me because most of the time these days books are concentrated either about young women addicted to buying shoes, clever criminals and family scandals, All of which I am not interested in. I also love playing computer games and giving my obviously ‘much needed’ opinion to blogs like this.

Would you say that I am a victim to this media? That I should be painting or doing sudokus?
All I know is, I am a proud consumer and over all I love watching the inside of my eyelids better.

Feel free to tell me how much you dont care about what I just said. :D

But the war against cognitive surplus in America began, quite consciously, during the FDR administration. Cognitive surplus was seen as the first step towards worker unrest.

The idea for three fruit trees in every Levittown garden (supplied free) was specifically designed to use up men’s time so that they wouldn’t stray from home and organize.

Of the Internet-connected population, how many have heard of Wikipedia? Of that number, how many edit it? Of those, how many actually add new information, rather than fixing grammar mistakes?

The vast majority of people on the Internet are consumers, not producers. Even in terms of comments, I’d wager that the comment-to-pageview ratio, even excluding rss, is far below 1%. Saying that all this cognitive surplus is going to the advancement of the Internet is nonsense. People are just finding new diversions. Instead of watching Seinfeld, they watch YouTube.

Also, as far as the principle of “It’s better to do something than to do nothing,” that’s rarely the case. Is it truly better for people to play WoW than to watch television? How so? Within the sphere of WoW, maybe, but from an outside perspective, it’s very common for people to think, “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.” For people outside of that sphere, they are essentially doing nothing. It doesn’t impact them, they can’t associate; the people playing WoW are the only ones who see it as doing something. Finally got your epic mount? People who don’t play WoW don’t care. And this can be extended to many other areas that Shirky places high interest in: blogging, captioning cats, etc.

In fact, the reason that this use of cognitive surplus is on the rise isn’t some grand awakening: the cognitive requirements for use have just been lowered to the point where “mere mortals” can gain entry. Blogging is just an extension of the personal homepage that’s been around for over a decade. Now, though, you don’t need to know HTML. You go to blogger.com, fill in some details, click some buttons, and you’ve got a homepage. Type your thoughts in a box, hit another button, and you’re suddenly a blogger. Because of this lowered entry requirement, anyone can put anything online without regard for its quality or usefulness, and I fail to see how this is cognitive surplus being put to good use.

Oh, and the sitcom is dead because of reality TV. Just as many viewers, a fraction of the cost. Absolutely genius.

wikindex.com

It is true that the internet has allowed the amateur producers to organize and create works that are much larger and significant than those which could have been made before the internet.

However, there’s another interesting force at work in TV, an even further dumbing down. Look at A&E, Bravo, The Learning Channel, The Discovery Channel, the Food Network. Look at what profiteering and reality television have done to all of these outposts of thoughtful and useful information. Look at what Bravo is now; it’s the ‘oh snap!’ reality channel. Look at TLC and its macho “super big stuff and awesome motorcycles!” contingent.

However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

The economics behind the “participation economy” was laid out by Benkler in “Wealth of Networks.” His take on the “invisible hand.” This invisible hand is fueled by “excess cycles” and that is the primary economic force that underpins open source software. Yochai uses several cases studies that are quite informative on this topic. The PDF is available here: http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_of_Networks.pdf

Technology has removed three critical barriers to participation: entry cost (cost to make and host video, for example), ease of learning (access to helpful communities or just the internet in general), and distribution. Participation goes up, but then everyone complains we’ll drown in crummy content.

Not really, because the next problem that arises as a direct result of the first three being solved – navigating content to find stuff you want to see – is already getting very easy. 90% of art on DeviantArt is poor, but I spend 90% of my time browsing it looking at great stuff, thanks to the smart way they put it together, which incidentally (along with all the others doing this stuff – YouTube, Amazon, etc etc) leverages these ‘lesser’ forms of participation such as rating something or even just *looking at it* to make it easier to find good content.

It’s like a great big participation pyramid, and so far we’re only one floor up from the ground. To begin with we just build on top of what we already have (i.e. wiki about TV shows), but as barriers to climbing are reduced and as the next generation starts to take all this for granted, we can get a feel for the incredible scale of this thing we’re constructing.

Apples to oranges, there where ways to sink your time before the internet other then TV, sure the internet is good, diversity is good, having choices is good, but the tone of the article rubs me as saying “now that we have Oranges no sane person is going to eat Apples, and anyone who grows apples doesn’t understand how f’n juicy and delicious Oranges are… what a bunch of twits! amiright?”

But we all know that Cory writes books, which where long ago replaced by radio, which was replaced by TV, which we are now being told is being replaced by the interbutt… to be fair he does say “It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.”, and that’s the real rub of it. People who aren’t going to join the internet culture anytime soon don’t appreciate being told how amazing the mouse is, but almost no one frowns on more choices, I see it everywhere, and I’m pretty sure nearly everyone understands it.

Hell the question of who you would want to be stranded on an island with, Ginger vs Mary Ann, is just that, an eternal question of choice (http://youtube.com/watch?v=8wrEqsTJCmg). Mix and match other options, Xeni Jardin vs Starley Kine, as desired.

> I’m surprised anyone who reads boingboing would actually use the term “elitism” as spoonie did in the first sentence of his post.

As a regular BoingBoing reader, let me add a shout of “elitism!”, in support of Spoonie.

I love the net, I’ve been using it since long before the web, and it’s changed a lot about my world, mostly for the better – but I think Shirky, and quite a few other people tend to overstate the benefits and wonders of the net.

There is plenty of rubbish on the net, as well as a smattering of excellent stuff. There is excellent television produced, as well as heaps of drivel. For my part, I hardly watch any TV, spending most of my time on the net – and often enough I realise I’ve missed something pretty interesting on TV because I was idly flipping through blogs and cruising comment threads.

> Aren’t we beyond that Newt Gingrich-era method of dismissing all critical thought? Who am I kidding, of course we’re not.

Sure we are – we’re all wonderful now. BUT I wouldn’t automatically associate being on the net with critical thought, nor watching TV with being a sessile couch potato.

“The vast majority of people on the Internet are consumers, not producers. Even in terms of comments, I’d wager that the comment-to-pageview ratio, even excluding rss, is far below 1%. Saying that all this cognitive surplus is going to the advancement of the Internet is nonsense. People are just finding new diversions. Instead of watching Seinfeld, they watch YouTube.”

This may be broadly true, but all it takes is a comparison of the ratio of producers to consumers between television and the Internet to show that one medium invites more participation than the other.

Television is completely passive – you sit, you watch, you are given what the producer wants to give you and nothing more. There is no interaction between producer and consumer, unless you feel like writing a letter that no one will read.

The Internet provides an opportunity to interact with the producer, even if it’s just posting a comment to tell him that his latest observation is ‘teh suxx0rz’. By posting that comment, the consumer becomes a producer. Watching people get Rickrolled on YouTube may be no different from watching Seinfeld, but over time the YT consumer will create an account, leave a bunch of comments, and eventually produce their own videos.

In classic terms, a lot of Internet content seems scattered and chaotic. This, I’d argue, is because our classic media have been rigidly controlled and formatted in order to present a highly filtered view of reality. Real reality is a chaotic mess – that the Internet reflects this is a sure sign that something very organic and natural is taking place therein.