A friend sent me a link yesterday with the short description of “Intriguing…”

It was a link to Clay Shirky’s article Gin, Television, and Social Surplus and indeed it is an intriguing article where he sets out his initial thesis thus:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

It’s not a new theory, however I’m not entirely sure it’s completely accurate. Urban life is not a new invention: Rome at one point is reckoned to have had 1 million citizens, and Athens had 300,000 citizens before it. Whilst they both had their debauchery, nobody has ever suggested that Rome needed wine and orgies in order to function as a city.

His parallel starts to get more interesting however:

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

I’m not sure the “wheels would have come off”, but there is no doubt that even people on very poor incomes have more free time than people of similar economic standing would have had for many millenia - if ever.

He goes on to talk about this surplus of time as something useful, interesting and powerful. His first example however directly contradicts my thoughts around The Vision Thing:

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

Actually, it’s a change, but it’s not one we should embrace unless we say it’s the thin end of the wedge. That eventually something useful and interesting is going to happen and society starts working on interesting things. Clay goes on to talk about how if even one slither of that time of staring at the flashing box in the corner is used to do something productive, it means something interesting is going to happen.

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 think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

To an extent I agree. I don’t know what 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year is going to look like, but there is no doubt that something, somewhere is going to happen of interest.

But what are those 10,000 projects? Do we have the creative ability to do 10,000 useful things every year? Do we have the will to do something more interesting than throw sheep at each other or spending our entire time photoshopping memes? Time will tell.