Every Pop Song On the Radio

I dis­cov­ered a bit from Clay Shirky, talk­ing about how tele­vi­sion was the way post-griminess indus­trial soci­ety chose to cope with free time. Included was the bit that enough time is wasted watch­ing tele­vi­sion to pro­duce all of Wikipedia 2000 times over.

4 Responses

  1. Joel says:
    2009-01-25 at 10:54 pm

    I didn’t think peo­ple still com­plain­ing about tele­vi­sion when the Internet is clearly a big­ger and more addic­tive time-waster ;) .

    But more seri­ously, I don’t think the sta­tis­tic you quoted is that mean­ing­ful. Humans aren’t meant to be work­ing all the time full throt­tle. If we didn’t have TV, I doubt we’d have 2000 Wikipedias worth of work. Because 2000 Wikipedias takes a great deal more effort and think­ing than TV does and we sim­ply just don’t have the capac­ity to put that much effort and think­ing into every­thing we do, 24/7. Some peo­ple may, but the vast major­ity don’t and I don’t fault them for it. If peo­ple didn’t have TV to watch, they’d find some other way to waste time and relax.

  2. Adam Williamson says:
    2009-01-26 at 2:53 am

    I’m 100% with Joel. When I see that num­ber quoted it reminds me of those annoy­ing ‘research’ bureaux which are for­ever com­ing out with those “Non-Work Activity X Is Costing Country Y $Zbn Per Year!” ‘papers’, which seem to assume that the only accept­able state of affairs is if every­one sleeps six hours a day and works the other eigh­teen. It’s facile and just plain wrong to assume that time spent watch­ing tele­vi­sion is ‘wasted’, as if there’s always some­thing more pro­duc­tive to be doing and every­one should be doing it all the time. As Joel says, peo­ple are built to have down­time — time where they’re sort of inten­tion­ally not doing any­thing very much. You’d go insane very quickly if you didn’t.

  3. dave says:
    2009-01-26 at 7:04 am

    I don’t know if this under­mines his gen­eral point, but his anec­dote about the child “look­ing for the mouse” is misleading.

    It’s under­stand­able for him not to know since it’s not his child but the pro­gram ref­er­enced, “Dora the Explorer”, reg­u­larly uses com­puter con­cepts such as a mouse arrow hov­er­ing on the screen and click­ing items. It is there­fore unsur­pris­ing for a child to be “look­ing for the mouse” dur­ing this par­tic­u­lar program.

  4. James Cape says:
    2009-01-26 at 8:26 am

    Obviously the fig­ure is of the “10,000 hours” vari­ety, but I also think that broad pro­nounce­ments about human­ity requir­ing veg­e­ta­tive time are also sus­pect: every­thing else on this planet calls their down­time “sleep” :-) .

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