AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Future of Media

Clay Shirky, author of the Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has a fascinating post on his blog about the sheer amount of brain power invested in television and, in specific, the amount of time we spend watching advertisements. According to Shirky, Americans spend the same amount of brain power watching television advertisements every weekend as it took to create Wikipedia. All in all, Americans spend the equivalent of 2,000 Wikipedia projects each year watching television. And all of this is because of a cognitive surplus caused by the increasingly ease of modern life.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost got off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now, I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

Shirky likens the television watching in the post-Second World War era to the usage of gin to assuage the jarring experience of moving from largely agrarian societies to the industrial revolution during the 19th century, and makes a pretty convincing argument for it.

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