Comment by pauljonas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pauljonas | Hacker News Reader

>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?

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