Time spent thinking
My post on the six-hour scene dovetails nicely with this speech by Clay Shirky, which argues that we’re living in an era that’s wrestling with a cognitive surplus:
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
Where this line of reasoning gets fascinating is when you factor in other ways people spend their surplus, such as television:
Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. 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.
I haven’t read Shirky’s book
(Thanks to John Gruber for the link.)
Articles
April 29th, 2008 at 7:06 am
I’ve been thinking about this topic lately, too. My concern is not the excess of cognitive thought, but: are humans actually any smarter? Access to information is definitely easier, but are we using our brains in different or better ways? Is there a limit to the sum of human consciousness, or is the internet and its ilk building a Tower of Babel that will eventually crumble on itself? Not withstanding false or unverified information, but what of the traits we’re losing? Does anyone remember phone numbers anymore? True manners and courtesy seem to have been replaced by pseudo-sweet greetings. It may just be me, but I don’t know if access to everything and anything is a great thing (not that ignorance is any better…) It’s kind of like Ayn Rand and altruism. There’s a script in there somewhere. For somebody smarter. I can’t even remember my own phone number anymore…
April 29th, 2008 at 8:04 am
That’s pretty much what the Unabomber was trying to communicate.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:25 am
That was a great, thought-provoking article. Thanks for the link. I love the idea of the TV exec running scared. And the hive mind isn’t always 100% correct, no. But as participation increases, it will continually correct itself and get closer and closer to 100%. (For example, I saw a film at a fest last weekend and the director actually asked people to post reviews at IMDB. I saw today that the film now has 10 reviews with 10 stars — way overrated. But when the movie’s released, or others log in who aren’t there just to impress themselves or the director, the average rating should drop.)
April 29th, 2008 at 8:26 am
PS to Barry: The reason we can’t remember phone numbers anymore is that people don’t hold onto them for 20 years, like they used to. I don’t think it has anything to do with our brains being fried by overuse of new media. If anything, electronic storage of phone numbers, maps, and other trivial things can save us time and allow big thinkers to concentrate on more important things.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:30 am
@Barry:
I never thought memorizing phone numbers was a good use of brainpower. And in terms of politeness, I think there’s a Golden Age myth happening there. We remember people being more polite when we were younger because we see our childhoods through the amber haze of nostalgia.
@Karni:
You might be joking, but the Unabomber’s manifesto is vastly different from what Shirky is saying, most notably in tone (dystopian vs. utopian). Yes, they’re both writing about changes in the socio-economic engine, but where Kaczynski sees an abyss of psychological frustration and limits to freedom, Shirky sees collective action and innovation.
April 29th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Thanks so much for this article! I loved it.
Didn’t Einstein say something about never memorizing phone numbers, since he could just look them up?
April 29th, 2008 at 9:53 am
I don’t know my own phone number. Admittedly, that can get inconvenient.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Not to be a fuddy-duddy about politeness, but I think that the general rudeness quotient R (if there was such a thing) has gone up significantly, even within the past 20 years. Think back to your last experience at the megaplex (or even more frightening, live theater).
But overall I’m an optimist about the information age, as long we use it productively and not for Rule 34.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:30 am
I don’t know. I’m still not convinced. I was half-joking about phone numbers (subtext! subtext! Like in that Halloween Simpsons episode where Kodos and Kang rule Springfield because they have no weapons.) There exists a theory (mostly on forums,) that humans are evolving and somehow superior to their previous descendants. I don’t think we are. For every useful participation/invention, something negates it (the whole atom bomb deal.) It’s like Sydney Pollack says in Michael Clayton, “I still get horny, I’m still vain.” And for every widespread invention that causes true change, a corporation invariably seizes it to make money (Bill Gates, Google, etc.) Whether it’s free is not an issue. We’re still at their mercy, like Pharaohs and slaves and Lords and serfs. That’s the human condition. People struggle and the elite try to seize power.
Having come back from an extended stay at home (rural Manitoba – I live in Vancouver,) my most precious moments are time spent with family. Did I accomplish anything? No. If I walk around or stare blankly at a television thinking about a screenplay, am I accomplishing anything? (the Coens like to nap to solve script problems. The Coens) My point is that for every new human action, something must be lost. It’s not all going to be good. For every altruistic action, it takes one person (or corporation ) to destroy it. We kill, cheat and lie. We’re humans and can never escape that fact (the Congo attests to that fact.) We eat, sleep, etc. A few hundred thousand people on the internet is akin to Sean Penn taking a busload of Coachella fans to New Orleans. Good intentions, but it won’t amount to much. Even though this sounds negative, I actually agree in theory with Shirky in theory, but the vast majority of people are not wealthy and worry more about day-to-day survival. The practicality comes into play.
Another note. Property in Vancouver is ridiculous. Land in rural Manitoba is worth pennies. There may be an abundance of whatever sustains us, but humans are a fanciful breed. If it doesn’t suit their lifestyle/needs, they won’t share/consume/produce. Thanks to all for this interesting debate. I haven’t found anyone to humor my erratic philosophical debates since moving. Note to John: having just returned from a small town, manners in Vancouver are quite different. And not for the better. Maybe, that’s just here. Cheers. Barry
April 29th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I think there’s a risk of overthinking this one. It’s quite simple, really. Call it evolution or devolution, it’s a forward movement you can either partake in, utilizing the new tools to your advantage, or fall behind and listen to vinyl. As far as losing humanity is concerned, in a hundred years there will be colonies on Marz and some sicko will rape his daughter in the maintenace chamber of his oxygen-delivery system. That, my friends, is human nature.
April 29th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Thanks for sharing the article. I am one of those people that watch a lot of television. If you call me during this time and asked what I am doing. My response will be nothing, just watching TV. The other day I was thinking that now that I am done with grad school, I should be doing something else with my free time (TV time). So I started reading with my TV on the background. Someday if I feel energize, I will turn off that TV and go do someone that will benefit the world now that I have a DVR.
April 29th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
That’s a pretty early post if your timestamp is correct. I’m going to go ahead and guess someone was up playing GTA all night? Hmmm?
And John, more than your post on the 6-hour scene, this article seems to fit perfectly with your web pilot during the strike (and to come, we hope). Instead of being a “viewer” in the sense that the strike happened TO you, you became a participant by finding a new way to share with the community. What the article is saying about new ways of using our brains is being seen online in Wikipedia and other places (YouTube, even YTMND.com) as each person discovers that the internet is a (mostly) open entity where everyone can see and be seen. That’s our cognitive power. It’s just like the paper clip thing that those kids did for the Holocaust. They set out a goal to see what 6 million was really like by collecting paper clips. They ended up getting them from all over the country. Sure, one person maybe only gives one little paper clip, but together they create a powerful storm of learning and experience. It sounds cheesy, but it happens, at least every once in a while.
April 29th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
You guys have a lot of time to think about this stuff…
Memento Mori
May 1st, 2008 at 1:09 pm
All signs point to devolution. I think America is devolving. We simply don’t need to know as much as we used to. Maybe its just that we’ve hit a plateau. We don’t need to know how gadgets work, just how to work them. But we’re smarter than we were 500 years ago. Everyone knows what are now basic facts that were not common knowledge years ago. We just havent had to work as hard as other generations have. But that’s sort of what they were working toward.
The artificiality of our lives is whats scary. We don’t hunt or run (some of us don’t) or spend time in nature like we used to.. we eat synthetic food products and take vitamins and medications ib pill form.
What long term affects will these things have? We don’t know.
Thats scary. But, hey, for now we’ve got it pretty good.