Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Clay Shirky has a really interesting article Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. It's definitely worth a read. It starts talking about the industrial revolution in Britain:

"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. "

He goes on to argue that television in the late 20th century was our gin. Watching Gilligan's Island was our stupor and we're coming out of it now. Wikipedia so far has taken 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."

Make it to the end, the mouse story is great.