I’ve just come across a very interesting and deep transcript of a talk by Clay Shirky on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Here is my favorite part:
It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.
This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. 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 this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. 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 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?
You bet, Clay!
Personally, I prefer reading a nice online article on technology, trying to make sense of it, suddenly getting the point and feverishly write something in the same vein on my own blog than sitting in front of the TV spending hours being passive and eating peanuts.
I believe that TV as we know it will die in the near future. Instead we’ll all use Pay-per-view and we’ll watch TV only when we want to waste some time doing nothing productive. The rest of the time, we’ll be in front of our nice Linux- or Mac OS X-based computer (Windows does not exist in my future…) educating ourselves… and others in the process.
(Photo courtesy of Mary Hockenbery)
i personally spend less n less time infront of televison, becase there’s lots n lots of much more fun stuffs to do instead. i don’t even watch the news lol.. yea some might say well you should keep in touch with things happening around you, well i do read the papers
whats nice, is that with newspapers i can go straight to the part that interests me and have a brief overview of whats going on.. we are being bombarded by media, and i think going though all of them is a complete waste of time, even for the news lol
as you said pay per view changes everything, we actucally don’t have to wait through numerous other shows to watch our favourite( btw scubs being one of mine :) )
for the future i believe the OS we’ll be using doesn’t matter, focus will be on browsers :P
hmm..
speaking of TV, have you just seen the biased coverage of the political meetings in the 19:30 news? IMHO, TV being or making us unproductive could still be ok but the fact that it manipulates information, distorts facts and insults our intellect is shameful, abhorrent and repugnant in more than a way. I am of course refering to our local station!
Not very relevant to your article am sorry. Maybe MBC journalists ought to be using Macs. They could benefit from its positive aura.
:p BSD will survive.
Hmm.. that will be a pretty boring future.
Thankfully, i have stocked lots of tv shows to watch when i have time :p. I’ll make the collection soo big that i can survive in such a horrible pay per view future :p
ok joke apart, that’s true that progress happens only when people share contents, but then, there’s another problem … most people are driven by jealousy, lust for money, and lazyness.. so in the end, the vast majority [who suffers from those] are not contributing anything, yet consuming.
To Vicks:
The Windows reference was just a joke. Of course, what will matter in the future is the browser…
To Sundeep:
I didn’t watch the news on TV yesterday (and neither the day before and the day before and the day before…) because MBC is so pathetically one-sided. According to some, the level of stupidity there is not far from being a world record…
To Selven:
BSD also will survive… through Mac OS X :-)
One thing I’ve realized over the years is that the “majority” will always just consume… because they CAN’T create. The act of creation requires energy and some lateral thinking that most people don’t have.
What is important is to let those who can create to do what they want.
And, at the end of the day, that’s what the Internet is giving us: a worldwide audience for our creations (however trivial they may be).
For example, I’m happy that I have more than 600 readers daily on this blog. I’m also happy that some people listen to my music…
@ SundeepT
going through MBC news is a complete waste of time, as we are surrounded by information its up to us to select the most appropriate.
@ Avinash
we are already sharing videos(youtube), music(lastfm), thoughts(blogs) on the net what according to you is next?
will it be possible share our lives??
to create our whole life virtually and in way let our friends live a day say as “AVINASH MEETOO” or “BILL GATES”.
Hi Roopa,
Those few who create videos on YouTube, create their own music on Last.fm and write their own blogs are still a minority.
In the future, when the tools become more intuitive (all hail Apple) then more people will indulge in that… as, according to the article (and I agree), people naturally like to share.
I was talking to my wife this morning and was telling her that the one sentence that many of us have uttered the most since we were born is: “X, vine gette seki mone faire!” where X is successively your mother, your girlfriend (or boyfriend) and your wife (or your husband).
The future will be a world of sharers instead of only consumers. I love it!
“The future will be a world of sharers instead of only consumers. I love it!”
hahaha.. there’ll be lots of swingers!
“For example, I’m happy that I have more than 600 readers daily on this blog. I’m also happy that some people listen to my music…”
bragging ..huh?
hmm shall try to listen to your music next time.
Maybe you’ll like it :-)
Sure, it’s not Megadeath (?) or Spultura (?) but it’s not too bad…
Yeah that’s true… I myself watch tv less and less… I simply choose my own movies and watch… ;) Better do something productive… thus passing our time and not sitting idle… as it is an idle mind is a devil’s workshop… :P And sitting like this and watching “useless” things on tv is no less… I spend most of my time either sleeping or surfing the net for new and interesting things… :)
Selven is right btw, people will share more and more in the future rather that only consuming… (An example is the torrent or even the peer to peer :P)
Its great to record, edit (Adobe Premier), and broadcast on the internet!
However, when I watch Discovery Channel and BBC Documentaries, I do not consider wasting my time before the TV.
My last blog post was on an info from the MBC News Service, this permitted me to get inspired to produce something and share it to the net.
“IMHO, TV being or making us unproductive could still be ok but the fact that it manipulates information, distorts facts and insults our intellect is shameful, abhorrent and repugnant in more than a way.”
Could Sundeep please kindly elaborate on this, such as providing a few examples? It’s easy to state something but very hard to explain!
Listened to “the end of times” (which reminded me of age of empires a bit, and “This is real” (which I preferred, btw, this is real reminds me of the types of music track set in keygens :p).
Your music can be set as tracks in games i believe :p.
ps. Its great that its free :p
+$3|v3n
@ El Nino
you have floods all over the place (where place is the whole inhabited word). and you think that’s terrible and all. when it happens in your own back yard, you think “Is that all?” and only pause to notice that the picture quality is different.
you have a prime minister that’s all over the news. You can wonder if that is all that is happening in the country and if the guy has some revolutionary teleportation device that allows him to be in so many places in a day.
I’ll take another example from the film “American History X” (which my pseudo-girlfriend forced me to watch). There is this guy, a known felon and generally, an asshole, driving really fast on the road. cops give chase and after a hectic pursuit manage to pin him down. The asshole, being an asshole, attacks the cops who are trying to arrest him. Now along comes a kid/guy/old woman with a video camera. and films the scene. he/she catches the cops beating the asshole to the ground very violently. they do not know about the reckless driving, car chase and all the anger and fustration those cops had to face to catch that asshole. they don’t even know that the asshole is an asshole or that he attacked the cops. All they see is a (black) guy being savagely beaten down by several (white) cops.
Immediately they will think its a racial incident. send their tape to TV stations. And this is the interesting bit: all the rest of the mass media will pick up the train and it will create a general hoohaa and you’ll all forget about the asshole and only concentrate on the “bad” cops beating a poor guy for a little speeding.
Hence distortion of reality. If you knew all the facts, you might approve of the cops. you might even have joined in and given the guy a few kicks to the head.
and if you think the asshole is an asshole, you’ve just been had by a little reality distortion of my own. If you repeat a point of view often enough you will think it to be true and be very confuse when offered an alternative. You may very often react very violently to defend the initial point of view you adopted.
What you see/read/hear in the media is not necessarily what you would accept to be true. what you see yourself may not be true either.
I say accept because Reality itself is a fickle concept. One approach is to consider that what your senses tell you is real and to further accept that your senses don’t sense everything. Going by those two alone. there’s a lot of Reality that isn’t real to you. Different people will give different reasons for the discrepancies. including god and science and Tom Cruise.
But as you will often find me saying: It Depends.
on what? well, Everything.
there’s a lot more but you should find that out on your own. …so as not to spoil the big surprise.
(this is probably not what sundeep meant, but you can rationalise arbitrary statements any way you like. and I’m usually more right than wrong)
@ selven, try the Dr. Who soundtrack. it’s what i’m listening to right now. and its froody.
How can you live without watching Dr House XD
Reading through got me the impression of dja vue (partially) of the Orange conference at Octavié whereby you make things revolve around you as opposed to the static schedule of tv programs and if you ask me, it seem a good idea…and you can make better planning as well….
But honestly,as i see it, there is something that needs to bridge the gap between, that catalyste to start the flow…that little something that can allow dynamic content with the quality of TV sets. Yes, LCD and Plasma are better, even RGB projectors in some cases comes with better viewing quality but the television is “something” else and a lot cheaper XD. If the technology of having your desktop and tv at the same place was more affordable, lot of things would have changed.
Simple example on myself, come home, and go straight away in room, most of the time is spend on the net and get out only to eat and if it was not for Dr House, i think i wouldnt even watch tv (and because i dnt already have it on media right now XD)…i think even if its in my room, i need the TV feeling, like a more comfortable chair, a set which i could watch from a little distance and still enjoy….those little stuffs that make tv what it is.
Maybe if things like LCD or even the apple tv (lol the AVI cable for my ipod costs Rs1000.00…might be cheap in the USA, but its simply telling me to keep away :D or invest elsewhere) were affordable to the mass, those other services like VOD boxes and such would have been more common
hehe this article reminded me of how i used to listen to the radio at home and now,i cant remember when i took the radio to listen to FM or AM at home,even a cd :s….Now its most of the time mp3 on pc….for sure, a new trend is getting most of us..hopefully someone will see this coming and put the right service and hardware at the right price :D (and become rich ^^) {lol i listen to internet radio more :o…lets hope for a future with bright experience and content }
p.s. Selven, death note available if you need :)
n!135h… won’t you agree with me that this is “deja vue”..? :p or deja heard :p
Ofcourse, am taking everything as soon as the exams are over.
ps. I’ve completed my anime server, you can send to that, its faster :p and you can listen to mp3s in the mean time :p
lol my genre of music is mostly rock, metal and death :p. Just listened to avinash music to test it out :p. Thanks nevertheless.
+$3|v3n
what!?
Daleks: “EXTERMINATE!!”
ah,well. I thought I’d mention because of the keygen music. First TV series in the world to use electronic music as opening theme you know. And it being a bbc series, the people in it look like real people, not movie stars, so you usually learn something new. (who ever said television stifled creativity?)