Does the Internet Make You Smarter? | Hacker News Reader

Does the Internet Make You Smarter?

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29 pointswherespaul8 comments

"the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads."

That's a striking comparison. What really matters in people's lives is how they spend their free time, when they could be doing anything from something totally time-wasting to something incremental and productive. (I have just recently become a Wikipedian. I essentially never watch TV.)

I wish Shirkey would start comparing Wikipedia creation not to TV watching, but to the jobs that the people who write Wikipedia are (theoretically) doing while they're writing Wikipedia.

One could say the same thing about OSS, at least in the context of OSS which management does not know about.

If you think 10 hours of TV a week is a waste of human potential, you should see what some people do for 40 hours a week. (Or vastly, vastly more, in some cases. Why hello, Japanese salarymen...)

There is definitely something to be said for taking a bit of time to truly have a negligible effect on anything of importance.

Much agreed. It was just as all the people who truly believed that google pacman contributed to millions of hours of lost productivity. Really?

In most cases, people at their jobs probably just substituted one "time waster" with another (whether it be job related or not.)

The people running around screaming how google pacman cost valuable time are probably the same ones who also idlely sit in far more costly pointless meetings all day long.

"The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period before society had any significant digital freedoms."

Who are these pessimists?

I also had the impression that he was arguing against people who may not exist in any significant number or position.

I'm guessing he's arguing against people like Nick Carr and Andrew Keen, who've gotten a great deal of press in prominent places. Certainly, Keen seems to have the point of view Shirky is describing. Carr is more nuanced, but still seems to be arguing for something pretty close to that point of view. These points of view are uncommon amongst hackers, they're quite common in other parts of society. Certainly, many journalists seem to want a return to the 1980s.

There is a video where Clay Shirky discusses a similar issue -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyoNHIl-QLQ (Part 1 of 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNCblGv0zjU (Part 2 of 2)

Link to the transcript of the video above and HN discussion

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174410

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