Al vijftig jaar lui op de bank tv kijken

Vijftig jaar lang hebben mensen dagen, avonden en weekenden gevuld met televisie kijken. Iedere Nederlander zit iedere dag een paar uur voor de televisie terwijl hij zich hangend of liggend laaft aan beeld en geluid uit de tribal campfire of, zo je wil, the drug of a nation.

Wat als je een klein, heel klein beetje van die tijd doorbrengt met het próduceren in plaats van cónsumeren van media of bijdragen aan een gemeenschap? Dat vraagt de Amerikaan Clay Shirky zich af:

“(…) So how big is that surplus [of free time, EB]? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 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 98 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of the cognitive surplus that’s finally being dragged into what Tim O’Reilly calls an architecture of participation. (…)

Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society. (…)

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 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you? (…)

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. (…)”

Wil je je hersens verder kietelen, bekijk dan Shirkys volledige praatje hieronder:

*klikt de podcast van Bommel weer aan*