Gin, Television, and Social Surplus | Hacker News Reader

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

herecomeseverybody.org

153 pointsbdfh4255 comments

We should remember that not all time is interchangeable; just because you're up to spending 4 hours zonked out watching TV in bed does not mean you are up for spending 4 hours doing useful cognitive work. Maybe you're tired, hung over, sick, not feeling it, etc. However, even given this caveat, the author's point still stands. Because even if 4 hours of TV watching only translates to 1 hour of useful creative work and 3 hours of blah, that's still a huge amount of cognitive surplus.

But I think that it is like exercise - just because you watch TV for 4 hours, doesn't mean you could have jogged or rode a bike for 4 hours straight instead; your body isn't up to it. Why isn't it up to it? Because you're used to watching TV. So even if we only get a very poor 4:1 conversion rate at first, as we exercise our minds or bodies at doing other things besides TV, as a society we'll improve that exchange rate.

Along this line: when people say, "I would <x>, but I don't have the time" (where <x> is some creative, interesting thing), usually one can substitute the word "energy" for "time" in their statement, and learn a lot more about them: they are essentially asserting that they are too energy depleted to <x>.

Along this line: when people say, "I would <x>, but I don't have the time" (where <x> is some creative, interesting thing), usually one can substitute the word "Vespene gas" for "time" in their statement, and learn a lot more about them: they are essentially asserting that they are too Vespene gas depleted to <x>.

I don't understand this post. If you substitute a word that's essentially the same, that's a synonym and you therefore gain no meaning. And it makes no sense to say people are essentially asserting something when you put an assertion in their mouths.

I think it's more complicated than energy and time; generally, I don't think people actually like <x> enough to want to invest some time and energy or Vespene gas in it. I just went to an energy efficiency event today. 45 people had signed up and only 27 showed up to install energy-efficient things today. It would have taken 5 hours and very little energy. I think a lack of interest, causing a lack of commitment, explains it better.

I think when people say they "want to do <x>, but don't have time" it really translates to: "I feel like I should do <x>, but I don't really want to."

Exercise is the classic example.

Right, that's common behavior. And "I don't have the time" can also just be a polite excuse to get out of doing something unpleasant. When something is truly important people find a way to make it happen, regardless of how little time they have.

"Because you're used to watching TV."

I watch very little TV, so I can confirm your idea that you get used to doing more creative things if you cut it out. I do watch DVDs which I rent from Amazon, but that's different because I get to choose the shows and when I watch them. A lot of it is very non-mainstream so I get something more out of them as well. And no time wasted watching ads, what's not to like? :)

I also find most of the Internet very boring, until I start putting something back in. I've recently grown a bit tired of my main project for the last few months (surftrackr.net) so I'm starting another one as soon as I get a break from work, which has been tough recently.

I think the "Here Comes Everybody" guy has a real point about changing patterns here. I only hope there's a lot more to come and we haven't peaked already. Sometimes I feel not so optimistic.

>So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

Odd, I had a moment like this about a year ago or so…

I had just recently revamped an organizational website and made it more interactive, more user-participatory, and had made a remark to an office assistant on how great it was that new "editors" were jumping in and adding all this content, citing one in particular. Her response was the same as the TV person Shirky described - "it must be nice to have all that free time"…

Irony being that unlike me (that I rarely watch TV and basically live on the net, work time and a good bit of off time too…), most of these folks can rattle about endlessly all the TV programs they watch and how much they love their DVR…

My least favourite phrase in the English language has to be "they must have too much time on their hands" in response to something creative but niche (re-creating Star Wars in animated ASCII art, for example). My usual response these days is "at least they weren't just watching TV".

Personally I take it as an insult when someone says that in response to something creative I've built. You go months work-school-sleep-work-school, waiting for the occasional free hour or two to work on something because you're passionate about it, sacrifice sleep or social life, and when you get done someone looks at it and says, "I don't understand the work that went into this and I'm not going to expend the cognitive effort to gain any understanding, but, damn, it must be nice to have loads of time on my hands like you obviously do."

Being derisive about your creative endeavours is probably better for their ego than realizing how useless they are...

This is so true. A very quick story - last year when I was coming up to leave University I decided to make leaving presents for my housemates as we were all about to part ways. So using my fairly basic Photoshop skills I created some digital photo collages, very simple but very effective, then went out and got some cheap frames and printed them out. When I gave them out later that evening they absolutely adored them, they were very cool. They also said I must have had far too much time on my hands to have done these, to which I replied 'I did it while you all watched Happy Gilmore'.

This notion that contributing or creating something is seen as a waste of time really gets to me. Personally, I get far greater satisfaction spending my time this way than watching the mind-rotting junk that finds its way onto the television, yet this is seen as the normal way for us to spend our time. The worst part was I felt I had to watch it just so I could spend time with my friends. I really hope there is a shift in thought upon us.

(I am so sorry Adam, for the record I love that film. I don't care if it contradicts my comment, that film rocks.)

I think there is a shift in thought upon us. Twelve years ago people thought my family was strange because we didn't watch TV; now when you say you stopped watching TV the reaction is more like what you'd get if you told someone you were exercising or on a diet.

I like your last remark. Especially because it doesn't contradict your comment as much as you think. Shirky said: "People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share". He probably means to say that people like to share what they produce, but (at least) in case of TV people also like to share what they consume. Having seen the same movie/show/etc. makes us feel 'connected'. In that sense 'traditional media' actually hit two of his three points, not one.

No, wait, that's not entirely right :) The traditional media of course don't enable the 'sharing' through them. Still, I think there is a lot of (social) value in watching TV in the sense it 'gives you something to talk about' (to say without nice words ;)

Yes. This is why I grudgingly approve of the idea of a 'canon' of great (or maybe just popular) works. The actual quality of the work isn't so important - but shared culture both acts as social lubricant and provides a higher-level language to discuss your lives. That's true whether you're quoting Buffy or Faust.

> (I am so sorry Adam, for the record I love that film. I don't care if it contradicts my comment, that film rocks.)

There's a time for watching movies as much as for anything else. The problem with TV is that is puts you at one end of a big tube while they're feeding the other, with little choice as to what you get and lots of commercials.

I haven't watched TV for years now, but I do watch lots of anime and right now I'm at episode 3 of Blake's 7. The difference is I choose what I watch and try to make it as diverse and interesting as possible.

There's a lot to say about how I choose what I watch/read/listen. Sometimes I do just waste time on comedies, but sometimes it's a very active and rather difficult process of search and selection. I often go from an anime to a book of from reddit to a movie. Recently a sum of factors, mainly Junni Kokki (anime) but including a discussion here last week led me to some heavy Confucianist reading. This is a topic which would be perfect for a web 2.0 startup, but I haven't seen any serious contenders and I don't have my ideeas settled yet. But just imagine: what if you could jump from somebody's profile here to his favorite media (books/movies/shows/music/articles)? What if you could make a ... gestalt of what hacker news or reddit or digg reads/watches/listens? It took me 26 years to find out Ayn Rand existed (just an example). Before the net it could've taken me a lifetime or more. It's time to lower that a bit more, don't you think?

I don't understand why Shirky used the phrase cognitive surplus as opposed to time surplus. After all, free time could be spent productively doing cognitive work, but it could also be spent productively performing routinized labor. Most of the top wikipedia editors rack up their massive edit counts from correcting spelling mistakes and wikifying content, not writing original articles.

Free time is not just a recent thing. Back in our hunter-gatherer days, many of us had tons of free time. Even as agriculturalists, it was common for people to have to devote zero time to work for months on end. At times like this, young people could sing, dance, and play music for over 12 hours a day. There were places in Ireland that were like this in living memory.

Aye, but free time combined with mass wealth is a rather new combination.

Good point!

I disagree. Leisure time for the masses is a recent development. If one observes modern small farmers and seasonal agricultural laborers, reads history on peasants, pre and industrial laborers then one should take away the observation that these people work and worked all day long most if not all their lives. Even for hunter gatherers, they spend most of their time half-starved scratching for food.

Hunter gatherers actually had plenty of food and leisure time and were much better nourished than their agricultural compatriots. Jared Diamond wrote a good article summarizing their lifestyle: http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/

Seasonal farmers in Europe and Russia spent half the year doing nothing. Even if they had to work their asses off during the growing season, they had nothing BUT leisure time during the winter. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html

If hunter-gatherers had such great lives, you have to ask why they took up agriculture. Presumably it made their lives better or they wouldn't have done it.

I think one problem with pre-agricultural life was that it was so unpredictable. You had plenty of food, until you didn't.

Another downside was what hunter-gatherers had to do to their parents when they got too old to travel, and to children born too close together.

well, you have to ask why some of them took it up. but once that initial tribe did, they could've spread their way of life by conquest, since agriculture generally supports bigger populations than hunting. that newfound power might answer the why-keep-it-going question. as to why they'd even start (assuming they didn't decide to switch based on theories about population growth), i recall hearing a plausible-sounding hypothesis that hunter-gatherers experimented with agriculture to keep rare drug-producing plants in supply.

I've also heard the theory that alcohol production was one inducement to settlement.

There is a well known study of Native American cultures in the Mississippi valley where we have access to skeletal remains over many hundreds of years. We can see the health of individuals decline as they made their switch to corn agriculture from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In fact, there are considerable increases in disease and a shortening of lifespan. The reason why the agricultural lifestyle won-out was because it was capable of supporting larger populations with ruling theocratic elites who could then organize manpower for military and other purposes. Hunter-gatherers, despite being healthier individually, couldn't compete.

The reason why the agricultural lifestyle won-out was because it was capable of supporting larger populations

Think what that implies. If the hunter-gatherer mode of life couldn't support a large population, how was that limit enforced? It had to be by people dying.

But that wasn't what I was asking anyway. I wasn't asking why agriculture won, but why it started. The first agriculturists must have switched from being hunter gatherers. Why, if life wasn't better?

(I realize the switch was a matter of degree, so consider the preceding question as an abbreviation for asking why about each degree of switch.)

Could be because life was better in the (relatively) short term, but ended up worse overall. Maybe it also seemed better than it actually was. Evolution had prepared us to see and fear the hazards of hunter-gatherer lifestyle (such as hunger), but not of agricultural lifestyle (such as eventual disease).

I would think that it would have been more gradual than that. Some people in the community probably started growing the plants that they usually went out and gathered, since it was easier. Maybe during a time when they weren't moving as much. Or maybe they migrated between different areas depending on the season, so they planted, say, berries at all the different sites. I think it would have started more like that. Then because there was more food available from this, more people started doing it, and eventually it won out over migrating all the time or even staying in one place and hunting and gathering.

The wild rice gathering practice of current-day Native Americans in Minnesota is a great example of incremental drift into agriculture. They go back to the same patches in the water brush rice into their canoes with paddles, inadvertently spreading the seeds of new rice plants in the process. It's easy to imagine how this could've turned into rice agriculture over time.

People don't do what's always in their best long-term interest. They don't always even act in their best interest in any form.

Re predictability: You could say that about agriculture too. Think about the great potato famine in Ireland. Agriculture's not immune to famines from droughts or pests.

A hunter who hunts twice as much doesn't eat twice as much, he starves to death.

This doesn't invalidate Shirky's point. It just changes the plot of the story: Once, the Irish had free time to make music. Then modern industrial society took that time away. Now it's being taken back -- to make music (and LOLcats and Wikipedia entries and WoW characters).

These are the kinds of articles and thoughts that really make me cherish Hacker News.

IMHO, this was definitely one of the best key note of the entire Web2.0 conference.

Agreed, did you talk to him at Speed Q&A at Web2Open?

http://www.socialtext.net/web2open/index.cgi?speed_q_a

That was my favorite part of the conference.

Thanks again to Tony for putting it together, being able to talk to these people in an intimate setting was amazing.

-Andreas

>The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year... One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think he messed the maths up

1 wikipedia = 100 Million hours (from earlier in the article)

Annual TV watching = 1,000,000 Million hours

1% of annual TV watching = 10,000 Million Hours = 100 wikipedia's

Correct me if I'm wrong.

>The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

He switched context from discussing the US-only consumption to total global television consumption. It seems worth thinking about the implications of this change even if the numbers are inaccurate.

Yes I agree it is useful to consider the rest of the world. However that was not the cause for the discrepancy and the numbers are still out by a factor of 100. If you think that 1% of global surplus attention could annually create 10000 wikipedias instead of 100 then you are likely to reach some very different conclusions. Maybe he switched context from 1% to 100% - that would make sense.

You're completely right. To convince myself:

  trillion = 10**12
  wikipedia = 10**8

  surplus = trillion
  applied_surplus = surplus * 0.01
  print applied_surplus / wikipedia

which leaves us with only 100 wikipedias, as your numbers claimed.

Wikipedia = 100 million hours

Annual TV in US = 200 billion hours

Time watching Ads in US, per weekend = 100 million hours

Annual TV worldwide = 1 trillion hours

Yes and 1% of 1 trillion is 10 billion which is the equivalent of 100 Wikipedias - NOT the 10,000 Wikipedias he was proposing.

Is it me, or does this guy speak like Paul Graham writes?

Well I agree with him, and I don't ever watch TV, but... interactive media seem to be better at sucking people in than TV. And they're getting better all the time. This is starting to scare me, nobody else?

And there's an exceptionally thoughtful Reddit thread on the topic: http://reddit.com/info/6h7ph/comments/c03u0jv

"We should remember that not all time is interchangeable; just because you're up to spending 4 hours zonked out watching TV in bed does not mean you are up for spending 4 hours doing useful cognitive work." --phaedrus

This statement is somewhat wrong. I gave up T.V. about 3 years ago and this may have been true at first, but as you go on you realize that when you feel tired you are usually just bored, and need to do something. If you are really tired then go to sleep, don't stay awake forcing yourself to be entertained (gorging when you eat?)

It isn't Just T.V. that is bad. Anything that updates is bad since you come back over and over looking for a new fix of "something new"; I've found this activity extremely draining on your ability to go out and do new things; you drop into a mode of wanting to do to a mode of just wanting things to come to you to entertain you. This means that the internet is almost as bad as T.V. (if not worse, more content to surf around) Think of all the things that are currently popular : myspace, youtube, stumble, facebook..etc.. Almost exactly like T.V. People go to those sites to zone out and have information handed to them. The same goes for email, people keep checking their mailboxes hoping to have a new nugget of joy that will keep them busy for a few more minutes.

I started off With No T.V. (cold turkey), I used Movies to supplement the cravings, then I started cutting back on movies, not because I was trying to cut back on them, but because I just don't find them interesting any more. Next I cut out all forms of gossip and news from the internet. Pretty much anything that you read that can make you angry from either a) "how stupid" the person writing it is, or b) how anything like "that" could ever happen, you just need to cut it out; why do you want to work yourself up? This would include sites like slashdot.org, digg, reddit..etc. After cutting these sites out, my over all mood has become much better; those sites just contain thoughts that do you know good what so ever. (How did I read this to be posting on it? Someone sent me the link. Which is a great system; if something is worth knowing, someone will tell you.) After giving up most every news site (they are all tripe that just spread gossip and violence.) I started reading just "creative" blogs (make magazine for example.) Recently I have found that It doesn't matter what you read, since you'll end up just going back to be "entertained". Why is this bad? Because you switch off, you might think to yourself that you'll get inspired by reading inspiring blogs, but you won't. What you'll find out if you are paying attention is that most blogs are just recycled content over and over; there are very few original ideas out there.

After giving up almost all forms of "updating" sources. I have found that I no longer have enough time in a day to do all the stuff I want to get done. If I feel too tired even to read a book (not usable energy as someone stated.) then I go to bed.

There are millions of things to do out there, you just need to find them.

One other mistake I made was when trying to learn a lot of new things I would bounce around between them, which isn't bad, but I found that when I got stuck learning something new, I would switch over to doing something else, which is bad. So If you plan on learning new things, set a time for yourself. If you start an activity stay with it for at least 1 hour (or whatever) to make sure that if you hit a wall you work your way over it instead of moving on to something else. Also, I have found that keep a journal of all the things you learn to be very useful. Whenever you have some free time, you can read through the past things you have learned to refresh your memory.

You can respond to this comment all you want, but as stated i've pretty much given up this type of entrainment (blogs) altogether and I'm just here because someone sent me the link; I wrote this in hopes that it may help some people that are moving down this path already. If you think this was all dumb crap (maybe it is, life systems change over your life.) , well then don't use it. If you have any questions: matt.poepping@gmail.com

I think poepping's comments here are the most accurate so far (everyone else has been great also!). I myself replied to the author of the original piece with a tidbit that poepping elaborates on further. I said, "I would just add that I suspect many of my college-age and young-professional friends and colleagues spend significant percentages their cognitive surplus on not just the standard funny-media but the news. NPR, cnn.com, many news aggregate websites, etc. This seems a little more insidious than gin and sitcoms since they actually think they're benefiting in some way. I'm afraid I believe that they are not only wasting their cognitive surplus, but are also being loaded up with expert-vetted beliefs that they ingest with as little thought as with anything else."

Gin and sitcoms are only the beginning, we aren't through deploying all of our cognitive surplus yet, by far. I love hacker news, but I think I need to follow through with this understanding :D.

Where do anti-depressants come in?

Since many of the most popular anti-depressants don't actually do anything, I guess TV has to play a role as well.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn13375-prozac-do...

Maybe we need more gin carts.

>Since many of the most popular anti-depressants don't actually do anything

I of course have only read the mainstream summary of the study, but I think the study must say that anti-depressants usually don't cure depression. But I can assure you that messing with serotonin reuptake makes people happier.

One might assume my previous post was made in jest, based on the flippant closing comment. But without a smiley, who can tell? ;-)

What about _good_ movies that make you think?

I don't think the author was claiming we should or would stop watching purely passive media. His statement was more that, on the whole, time spent passively receiving is cognitive surplus. If the floodgates are opened even a bit (1 hour in 100), the resulting output will be immense.

And this is only the beginning.

"all you do is play on that computer!" goes back to watching TV

Yeah, because your time watching entertainment tonight is better spent than my time researching for economics.

I fucking hate old people.

I thought those first two lines were pretty good. It's probably that last one that brought on the downmods.

By old people I mean people that criticize any paradigm they aren't familiar with. You don't have to be old to do this, but old people are more likely to do it. I could have used the term neophobe I suppose.

OTOH, the thought of old people down modding me makes me lol.

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