Clay Shirky, author of the newly released Here Comes Everybody. In two parts:
The sitcom as the social glue of mid-century society.
Society had to learn how to manage free time.
TV had absorbed our surplus of free time.
Wikipedia represents 100 million hours of human thought (TV representing 2 billion hours every year).
TV’s hrs/year in USA = 2000 Wikipedias
Americans spend 100 million hours a weekend watching advertisements.
The physics of participation is more like weather than gravity. All the forces combine
Traditional media (TV, etc) is not the only option anymore.
Media production and consumption was the old way.
New way: produce, consumer – and share.
This is a shift analogous to the industrial revolution. This isn’t something a society grows out of. We’ll grow into it.
‘cognitive surplus’
"A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken."
(‘media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include may not be worth sitting still for)’
‘we’re looking for the mouse’
(found via Josh Morgan’s Don’t Eat the Shrimp)
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