ghotifish.net

Via kottke, an essay on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus:

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. We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

When my mother disapproves of a TV show, or of TV in general, she shakes her head and says, “this is why there will never be another American revolution.” It’s really a pretty good point (if applied a little selectively), and one that I think Gil Scott-Heron missed. No one’s going to show up for his party because he scheduled it for a Thursday and they don’t want to miss the new Grey’s Anatomy, which is better than his silly revolution because the people are more attractive and you can skip out for a beer during the commercials.

Or perhaps that’s exactly his point, but if he wants to do something about it he should look for some sponsors and maybe think about voting people off the revolution every week. Potential tie-in with Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Maybe we can TiVo the revolution?

But that’s not really the point of the essay. The point is that perhaps we are finally coming up with something more constructive — more of an investment — to do with the surplus:

…if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

But there’s still a whole lot left:

And television watching? 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.

I will paraphrase that for emphasis: if every American stopped watching television for a year, we would have enough time to recreate the entirety of Wikipedia 2,000 times over. (Of course, we would have to leave out all the articles about Desperate Housewives.)