Social Surplus

[xoxoxoBruce]

Here, because I couldn't figure out if it should be in Entertainment, Internet, Technology or Philosophy.

An interesting article about social surplus or free time, and how we used, use, will use, it.

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.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

The next major change came after WW II

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.

But the times, they are a changing.

So how big is that surplus? So 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. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

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. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Even kids know...

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.

Most people I know, probably because I'm old, limit the PC to email and occasionally Google. (Suppose I should specify Google search these days) Online activity like games, boards, forums, etc, isn't in the picture... TV is king.

But it's increasingly in the future, just ask the kid. Oh, and before you brag about being way ahead of the curve, I know it's because you're a social misfit.

[Clodfobble]

Someday in the distant future, we will look back on digital TV recorders as the beginning of the end for TV. Common sense says it would lead to more TV watching, adding in the shows you would have otherwise missed, but in reality it means you cut out all the channel-surfing, and if you don't have one of your shows ready to watch, you wander off to do something else. I can't remember the last time live television was on in this house. Sometimes I even forget it exists. But the internet, that's still plenty full of mindless surfing material.

[Elspode]

Digital video recording is also changing the face of TV forever. The ability to fast forward through advertising has left producers and networks with no other choice but to drop blatant product placement and advertising, right down to characters discussing name brands and their uses, in the programming material.

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

Someday in the distant future, we will look back on digital TV recorders as the beginning of the end for TV. Common sense says it would lead to more TV watching, adding in the shows you would have otherwise missed, but in reality it means you cut out all the channel-surfing, and if you don't have one of your shows ready to watch, you wander off to do something else. I can't remember the last time live television was on in this house. Sometimes I even forget it exists. But the internet, that's still plenty full of mindless surfing material.

hulu.com kills tv for me. I don't have to have a specific time to watch the shows that I'm following anymore.

[Clodfobble]

But hulu was only created because of people skipping the ads with their DVRs. You can't skip the ads on the internet (yet,) so it's a way to regain some of that lost ad revenue.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Digital recording and Hula are still watching TV, just in a different way. I believe the article is suggesting that just watching will fade as people will prefer doing interactive shit, ie, games, contributing to freeware, writing articles, interacting with people and stuff like that.

In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

[SteveDallas]

I'm sure it's an interesting article Bruce, but I'm having too many martinis to actually go read it.

Originally Posted by Elspode

The ability to fast forward through advertising has left producers and networks with no other choice . . .

Yeah, notice that: producers and networks. What about local stations? They're REALLY in trouble. People want their favorite shows. If you like Heroes, you want Heroes. Do you really care whether it comes to you via WWTF Channel 7, your local NBC affiliate, instead of the national NBC channel? You probably don't, but WWTF's owners (which may or may not be the network itself) sure do. In the past there was no good way to get the show to you, or for you to get the show, besides the local broadcast affiliate. Cable TV started changing that, and the Internet has made it worse. There's now no technical reason that somebody who produces a show can't sell it to me directly without any middlemen (TV networks, local affiliates, etc.) involved. (Well, we do need ISPs.)

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by SteveDallas

I'm sure it's an interesting article Bruce, but I'm having too many martinis to actually go read it.

No problem, it'll be there when you sober up.

There's now no technical reason that somebody who produces a show can't sell it to me directly without any middlemen (TV networks, local affiliates, etc.) involved. (Well, we do need ISPs.)

Sell? BitTorrent, Pirate Bay, Limewire? All those others involved, TV networks, local affiliates, etc., insured the producers got paid. Will they still be producing?

[Flint]

I'm disappointed that I still have to record shows when they are broadcast.

That doesn't fit in with the information model I use everywhere else. If I know something exists, I find it and it is displayed immediately. I can look up an actor's profile on IMDB.com--now I want to click on that show/movie and WATCH it. RIGHT NOW. Why not? Charge my credit card, whatever. Figure out how you want to charge me for this and start providing it, YESTERDAY.

[be-bop]

I'm amazed that so many people watch whatever is on the box,God 98% of what passes for entertainment these days that's broadcast is pure and utter shit..
I think that's why I spend so many hours playing games and being on boards like this.