O fuck me. Claude Degler was right.

Posted April 27, 2008 10:09 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an
elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your
basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter."

Awesome.

Posted April 27, 2008 10:25 PM by Mary Dell

Mary Dell, ROFTLMAO.

glad I didn't have a beverage in my mouth despite my flexi keyboard.

Posted April 27, 2008 10:29 PM by Paula Helm Murray

Teresa, could you pretty please unpack that a little for us slower-of-comprehension types?

Posted April 27, 2008 10:35 PM by VictorS

Yes. I never watched that much TV -- I tended to read instead. But
reading, while more interactive than TV (because it requires the
reader's imagination to function), is still a fairly unsocial medium.
The time I spend online comes out of my reading time, which is the same
as most people's TV/movie time... but it's much more social and
interactive than either one. And I think that's important.

Posted April 27, 2008 10:37 PM by Lee

Does this video remind anyone else of the final flowering of humanity in "Childhood's End"?

"The general standard of culture was at a level which would once
have seemed fantastic. There was no evidence that the intelligence of
the human race had improved, but for the first time everyone was given
the fullest opportunity of using what brain he had."

"One unexpected result of this was the extinction of the
professional sportsman. There were too many brilliant amateurs, and the
changed economic conditions had made the old system obsolete."

Yet among all the distractions and diversions of a planet which now
seemed well on the way to becoming one vast playground, there were some
who still found time to repeat an ancient and never-answered question:

“Where do we go from here?”

(This is my first comment. How'd I do?)

Posted April 27, 2008 10:42 PM by Clan

I've been spending my cognitive surplus stimulus checks on some of them there free ebooks from Tor.

Some haven't been my style, some I have in hard copy, some are going to involve buying the rest of the series.

Posted April 27, 2008 10:50 PM by eric

Oof, his expression of personal regret at a childhood spent in the
basement watchin' stoopid TV really resonated with me, too. The memory
of my four-year-old self is rather jealous of the mouse-hunting
four-year-olds of today.

Sometimes I think that my entire career path now seems based around
making up for lost time. But, it's better than watching TV. :)

Posted April 27, 2008 10:57 PM by Jason McIntosh

VictorS @#4: Per my friends at Google, Claude Degler was an
eccentric fan who had various prophetic notions. I haven't read enough
to chararacterize beyond that. Teresa wrote about him in Making Book, reprinted here.

Posted April 27, 2008 11:13 PM by Mary Dell

I won't repost the McLuhan quotes I put on the Boing Boing comment
thread . . . suffice to say that he was way ahead of the game.

McLuhan's Understanding Media ends with an observation that
the age of automation and electronic media will see the end of fears
over conformity and give us a real challenge . . . what to do with
ourselves.

McLuhan is also fond of a Whitehead quote: The greatest advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

Hang on tight.

Posted April 27, 2008 11:16 PM by Stefan Jones

#6, Clan: Just fine, I'd say. I really need to re-read Childhood's End.

#4, VictorS: This may (or may not) help.

Or, alternately, this, this, or this.

Posted April 27, 2008 11:17 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"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."

Wow. Friggen nailed it.

Posted April 27, 2008 11:22 PM by Greg London

Secondary thought: I have a few friends who, from my POV, spend absolutely amazing
amounts of time watching movies -- new, old, it doesn't seem to matter.
And they write reviews of same, and I extrapolate that every review
represents at least an hour of time spent watching the movie itself
plus probably 15-20 minutes composing the review, and I've been
wondering for years where THEY find the time! Because they seem to have
normally-busy lives otherwise...

Posted April 28, 2008 12:10 AM by Lee

I like the part where 1% more contributing makes a big difference.
Because even on the internet I mostly just read (like Lee I never
watched much TV). But 1%? I can manage that.

And my kids are the generation after the gin carts. They play
interactive games, they text, they facebook, they enter contests with
self-developed neopets, they take care of stables of horses online.
Whatever is coming they are all set.

Posted April 28, 2008 12:10 AM by Tazistan Jen

Thanks, this is thought provoking.

However, I have to add: I'm a Warcraft player today, but I was a D&D player 25 years ago, and certainly Warcraft is a less participatory activity than D&D is and used to be. I'm just not sure the progression is even or unidirectional.

Posted April 28, 2008 12:25 AM by Matt Stevens

tnh, #1: Big Grin.

Clan, #6: It does seem that we on the edge of some sort of dramatic
transformation, doesn't it? But I don't think it's the end; only a big
change.

Posted April 28, 2008 12:51 AM by Randolph Fritz

Second thought: a colleague reports from CHI '08
that the focus of HCI is shifting from developing new technology to
applying new technology; to design, in other words. A threshold, it
seems, is being crossed in many areas of knowledge and many places in
the world.

It's about damn time!

Posted April 28, 2008 12:55 AM by Randolph Fritz

Now look at how Clay Shirky's message contrasts with a recent article in the NY Times which argues that we need to discourage people from offering cultural contributions. (Specifically, writing.)

Makes it pretty clear where the two poles of media attitude are, I think.

Posted April 28, 2008 1:12 AM by Remus Shepherd

This is very cool.

I am left with a tangential question that perhaps someone who has read Shirkey's Here Comes Everybody can answer. Is there a specific meaning behind titling the book with a Finnegans Wake reference? Here Comes Everybody being a phrase of importance within that book. My inner Joyce-nerd is curious.

Posted April 28, 2008 1:36 AM by Ben Morris

The narrative of Degler seems from this angle to read as a collective confabulation, ala the Cthulhu Mythos.

Posted April 28, 2008 2:08 AM by A. J. Luxton

“It’s better to do something than to do nothing... even LOLcats.” I am reminded of one of my stepfather’s favorite G K Chesterton quotes: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

Posted April 28, 2008 3:18 AM by Max Kaehn

I'm very skeptical of any message that involves completely
dismissing the value of an entire form of human expression, as Shirky
does with television. To say that playing World of Warcraft is
"actually doing something" while experiencing and engaging with the
subversive narratives of Desperate Housewives is wasting a
cognitive surplus seems...not backwards, but just kind of nonsensical,
a comparison that would be inaccurate if it weren't so meaningless. As
sick as Shirky is of hearing "where do people find the time", I'm sick
of hearing the word "mindless" attached to watching TV. Like anything,
it can be experienced mindlessly, but need not be.

Tell any Star Trek fanfic writer that television isn't a participatory art form. Tell people who spend their lives in academic dissections of Buffy that they're wasting their time, or not contributing anything.

Any art form is potentially participatory, potentially a dialog, and
while easy access to technology always heightens the amount of
participation that goes on, I'm not so sure that it fundamentally
changes the nature of the game. What we're seeing now with the internet
doesn't strike me as particularly different from the punk explosion of
the mid to late seventies, for example, when a startlingly huge number
of people simultaneously realized that they actually had a way to
express what they wanted to express, and went and did it. True, there
is no analogous moment with television, but I'd wager that has more to
do with the artificial restrictions, both governmental and corporate,
on the means of distribution than with anything intrinsic to the medium.

Posted April 28, 2008 3:19 AM by ethan

ethan @ 22,

I didn't take it as a dismissal of the entire medium of television
-- partly because I see a distinct separation between sitcom-era
television (which the writer was definitely dismissing) and
fandom-involved serial television such as your examples above.

The latter fits into an interactive picture in a way the former doesn't, and television is changing and has changed a great deal over the last few decades in order to accommodate that need for expression.

Also, from the horse's mouth, It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.
Presumably he's in there with that we. "Mindlessly watching Scrubs on
the couch" -- or in other words, spending a prolonged period of time in
absorption mode -- has its own inherent value. (For one, this mode
actually helps me recharge my writing batteries.) At the same time, I
agree with the observation that that mode was for a long time the
cultural equivalent of a hammer to which everything's a nail, and, you
know, we need hammers and all, but everything isn't, and ain't it
wonderful we have wrenches now?

(...Okay, I think I tangled some metaphors up in there somewhere, but I've had two hours of sleep. Howe'er
it was he got his trunk / entangled in the telephunk / the more he
tried to get it free / the louder buzzed the telephee / I think I'd
better drop this song / of elephop and telephong.)

Posted April 28, 2008 4:32 AM by A. J. Luxton

Matt Stevens @ 15 -

Thanks, this is thought provoking.

However, I have to add: I'm a Warcraft player today, but I was a
D&D player 25 years ago, and certainly Warcraft is a less
participatory activity than D&D is and used to be. I'm just not
sure the progression is even or unidirectional.

Tabletop RPGs almost certainly are more participatory (or can be, at
least - I'm certain there are games and campaigns that aren't or
weren't as well - hell, I've played in games that could have been
Warcraft sessions) than Warcraft is... for now.

But while CRPGs are, in some respects, a very old medium (Adventure,
Zork, etc.) - in other respects Warcraft (and Everquest, etc. as lesser
examples) is, in fact, something new - the Massively Multi-Player
Online part really does make "sitting in the basement pretending to be
elves" different from "sitting in the basement getting eaten by a grue... again."

and MMORPGS are really still in their infancy - Ultima Online is
just more than a decade old, and most of the really big (and advanced)
ones came online in the last five years or so.

MMORPGS also have plenty of interactivity and creation/sharing urge
enablers - machinima might have gotten their start primarily with Halo*, but there are more than a few
machinima that are generated in Warcraft, Everquest, and other games -
basically, any game that lets you record and save events and play them
back (in the engine or not) allows you to generate video that you can
then use to your own purposes.

And this doesn't count the social aspects - guilds, raid teams, fire
squads, trading, etc. In games that have Alternate Reality Game tie-ins
(like ILoveBees or the more recent Halo 3 tie-in), figuring out the
puzzle can be a huge social tie-in, as message boards light up with
clues, interpretations, guesses, and the like.

Right now, the tabletop experience is more expansively interactive
than MMORPG or CRPG experiences (although there have been efforts to
bring TTRPG-like experiences to the computer - the Vampire:The Masquerade
CRPG included a storyteller-driven option to its engine (although my
understanding was it was rather clunky), and Neverwinter Nights has a
toolset (Aurora) which allows users to create their own content (As do
several other games, with custom level builders, etc. - but Redemption
and Neverwinter Nights go further, allowing the GM to build cut scenes,
custom behaviors, etc.).

I expect to see that sort of engine customization ability and the
inclusion of player-directed content generation tools increase, not
decrease, as time goes on - Halo 3 has a whole bunch of new tools in it
that previously were either unrefined or nonexistent in previous
versions (much more powerful event recording, level generation, etc.).
(Halo online is really an MMOFPS - Massively Multiplayer Online
First-Person Shooter - but many of its tools are whizzer suited to
generating your own content).

Partly because there is demand - after they get done doing whatever
stuff the game company has set up for them, an increasing number of
players are saying "what next?" or "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if...".
Partly because including the tools - many of which had to be developed,
in whole or in part, to generate the game in the first place - doesn't
add much, in terms of development costs or game size, especially
relative to the revenue that can be generated (I know someone who
bought NWN just for the Aurora engine). And, honestly, partly because
the game designers are often geeks who think this shit is just as cool
as the players do... :-)

"Looking for the mouse."

Heh. I like it.

*Okay, I cheated on this one - Haloid was actually done by Monty Oum in a variety of packages, then composited in Director. But Red Vs. Blue is all generated with the Halo engine.

Posted April 28, 2008 6:34 AM by Scott Taylor

The embedded video isn't working for me. Link please?

Posted April 28, 2008 6:55 AM by heresiarch

A.J. Luxton @ 23: "The latter fits into an interactive
picture in a way the former doesn't, and television is changing and has
changed a great deal over the last few decades in order to accommodate
that need for expression."

I remember reading a bit from Everything Bad Is Good For You,
I think, which talked about how much more cognitively complex modern TV
is compared with even a couple of decades ago. The part that really
struck me was the invention of continuity. The idea that what happened
in one episode will affect later episodes? That was invented!
It sort of blew my mind--not because I have never watched reset-to-zero
shows*, but because I have watched them, without ever realizing what
bugged me about them. As much as I love the Simpsons, the fact that everyone forgets
everything they learned last episode frustrates the bejeezus out of me.
Contrast that with the twelvety-seven plotlines going on in every
single episode of Heroes, Lost, or any number of other modern shows, where missing even a single episode is a recipe for confusion and incomprehension.

For decades the common wisdom was that shows that required people to
know what happened last episode were unwatchable. In the last decade,
that's suddenly changed. Is it that the common wisdom was wrong, or is
it that the viewers have changed?

*Which is what I think Shirky means when he talks about sit-coms.

Posted April 28, 2008 7:29 AM by heresiarch

I kinda lost the ability to follow the speech given after hitting one of those "somone on the internet is WRONG" moments.

Sitcoms weren't a post-war innovation. Before TV, there was radio,
and it hooked people just as throughly, with plotlines and jokes that
were just as inane, or just as clever. And before radio there were
penny-dreadfuls, and the explosion of novels in the late Victorian
period.

What strikes me is that he's arguing that there's something
fundamentally immoral about narrative fiction. Or, if not immoral, that
consuming narrative fiction is a less worthy activity than arguing on
wikipedia. Or playing World of Warcraft.

Now, WoW isn't my drug of choice, but honestly, I've played my share
of video games. And there isn't nearly as much "pretending that you're
an elf", as there is "killing the same type of monsters over and over
until you level, or the item you want drops." There are better video
games and worse video games, but there are better or worse books and TV
shows.

I'm foursquare in favor of constructive hobbies. And I think that a
lot of stuff that's thought of as unconstructive is actually far more
constructive than it appears. But I really don't see that TV is really
at fault when people aren't more constructive. Or radio, or books.
Sometimes, what you have energy for is to consume careful crafted
entertainment. Or godawful entertainment, for that matter.

Also, he needs to learn more about the industrial revolution.

Posted April 28, 2008 8:08 AM by Alter S. Reiss

Alter S Reiss, #27: "What strikes me is that he's arguing that there's something fundamentally immoral about narrative fiction."

He seems to think that using television as a kind of sedative is
unhealthy. Given the amounts consumed, it's hard to argue that he's
wrong on either count: first that a lot of television is used as a
sedative, second that it is overused.

Posted April 28, 2008 8:38 AM by Randolph Fritz

Alter@27: What strikes me is that he's arguing that there's something fundamentally immoral about narrative fiction.

I didn't get that. I took it to mean that narrative fiction is a
surplus of intellectual energy, and once the tools are in place to
leverage it (computers, internet), then that surplus can be leveraged
into it's own revolution.

Or, if not immoral, that consuming narrative fiction is a less
worthy activity than arguing on wikipedia. Or playing World of Warcraft.

The piece I quoted, the piece that really struck me as getting at
something, was that the TV person couldn't understand where someone
could find the time to contribute to wikipedia.

But working in television means you work in an area that operates on
intellectual surplus energy. His response to her "where do people find
the time" question was that they already have plenty of surplus time
watching your television shows, they just chose not to watch as much TV
and chose to spend more time doing something more interactive.

put another way, the TV person whose audience can only watch them
via some intellectual surplus couldn't understand where someone could
have the intellectual surplus to work on wikipedia. To the TV person,
they couldn't see they were operating on a surplus, and saw themselves
different from wikipedia, and the other surplus mediums.

But they're not.

Posted April 28, 2008 8:44 AM by Greg London

I so get "looking for the mouse" - my 5 year old grandson will sit
for hours playing on the net. He can't quite read, and we have to
navigate to the websites for him, but once there we can walk away and
leave him to his own devices (secure in knowing that he can't leave the
site, so he's in a sandbox). His current favourite is a Power Rangers
site where he can assemble little clips into a timeframe, add sounds
and dialogue and make a little movie. OK it's a limited set of clips,
it's near impossible to make anything that makes any sense - but he
narrates the story to me as the movie runs. So here's a five year old
who's made his first movie before he's written a sentence. That's a
generational discontinuity right there. He still watches some tv - but
he'll choose internet over tv as long as he has the energy - tv is for
falling asleep to.

Posted April 28, 2008 9:22 AM by Andy Brazil

heresiarch @ 26: For decades the common wisdom was that shows
that required people to know what happened last episode were
unwatchable. In the last decade, that's suddenly changed. Is it that
the common wisdom was wrong, or is it that the viewers have changed?

Your commentary here really hits a note for me, because now that I
think of it, the serial TV show is my favorite form of storytelling
next to written fiction -- film hits somewhere lower on the list than
either. And conversely, the TV show with the cast of anterograde
amnesiacs is probably my least favorite form of storytelling.

Did Star Trek subtly pioneer continuity, I wonder? It seems to me that, while the original series didn't stack plot, the characters didn't forget their immediate history either and did seem to learn from it... (Not that I think it's the only source, just, it may have been influential.)

Alter S. Reiss @ 27, I again don't think the author was arguing
against TV per se so much as pointing out the collective overuse/abuse
of a certain kind of television, but I agree with you on And I think that a lot of stuff that's thought of as unconstructive is actually far more constructive than it appears. It's a lot of fun to dig through one's life and figure out the purposes of all the apparently "useless" things one does.

Posted April 28, 2008 9:23 AM by A. J. Luxton

I had the "but consuming narrative is what you do when you read! Why isn't that on his hit list? Or is it?" moment too.

I'm still thinking and absorbing* but one thing that comes to mind
about my objection (and the ones others have raised, too) is that you
can't possibly create all the time. You have to refill the well**
periodically. In theory we could refill only from life and nature, and
never absorb narrative, but in practice that's silly and unnecessarily
limiting.

Maybe the point isn't that we'll never sit and enjoy/partake in
non-interactive culture, but that we'll probably start making new
things of that culture as a matter of course. If media wants to have
some control over our making (assuming control is possible) they need
to accept that we'll be doing this and plan on it. At which point it
isn't a purely non-participatory medium.

Nonfiction books are barely non-participatory, because I think
there's a traditional assumption that we'll go and do and quote. Novels
and fiction... I dunno. Reviews, analysis and discussion are
traditionally acceptable participatory behavior.

Huh. Aren't reviews, analysis and discussion of TV a much newer
thing than television? We're expected to read (passively) a review of a
series to decide if we want to watch it, but non-professionals are not
expected to review or discuss individual episodes. Television Without
Pity was a big new innovation, wasn't it?

*And thanks to some morning caffeine, really feeling like my mind
can go anywhere. I'm so glad I keep my intake small so I can feel this
instead of getting immune to it. Of course, since I'm rambling a bit,
you guys might wish I did become immune.

** I can't recall the origin of that metaphor - wasn't it a science
fiction writer? I want to say Bradbury, but my googling isn't turning
up anything useful.

Posted April 28, 2008 9:27 AM by R. M. Koske

Ha. The knitters'/crocheters' website, Ravelry, has an
astronomically long forum thread on "annoying things non-knitters have
said to you," about half of which are variants on "where do you find
the time?"

Posted April 28, 2008 9:42 AM by Sarah

One day last summer I walked into Sasha's bedroom at lunchtime to
tell him to get his lazy self up while there was still daylight, and
found him doing something at the computer with a screen that had stars
all over it. "What are you playing?" I asked. "I'm not playing, I'm
identifying types of galaxies for an online site," he replied
virtuously. And he was. This astronomy project had put all their huge
numbers of pictures of galaxies online and were having random teenagers
identify them, and after this had been done three times (over the
summer) they had an essentially annotated database of galaxies. They
had turned data into information and advanced science using surplus
cognitive function.

You wouldn't believe how cheering I found this.

Posted April 28, 2008 9:47 AM by Jo Walton

He’s got some interesting ideas, but I’m not sure that I agree with
the basic premise, which I’d paraphrase as “As the tools for engaging
in productive leisure time activities become more conveniently
available, we should expect to see the number of people engaging in
productive leisure time activities rise proportionally.”

Yes, we’ve seen a rise in both the quantity and quality of
collaborative projects as a direct result of recent advances in
communications technology. The internet gave a lot of lonely geeks in
basements previously unavailable tools for constructing peer groups.
When they came together, many of them built cool things. However, my
feeling is that the speaker was overlooking a key fact: even provided
with superior tools, the vast majority of people will never attempt to
build anything. His statement:

“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.”

Presumes, I think wrongly, that the other 1,999 units of cognitive
surplus are qualitatively equal to the one that put Linux together. I’m
not saying there won’t be more stunningly cool collaborative efforts
emerging, but I doubt that there will be as many as Mr. Ellis seems to
think. For a small minority, the internet was a tool for identifying
and coming together with other people who were bored to tears with
Gilligan’s Island. For the vast majority, it’s just a better way to get
porn.

Posted April 28, 2008 9:58 AM by Scott H

Here's the money quote, as far as I'm concerned:

At least they're doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost
get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I
saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every
half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my
blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had
an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those
things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it
was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big
surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be
an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in
your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

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.

It's not possible to read that as anything other than a condemnation of
non-interactive entertainment. Reading a novel -- any novel -- is worse
than grinding your way through a level or two on WoW. Watching a TV
show -- any TV show -- is worse than arguing about gun control on
Usenet.

It's a stupid thing to say, but then, "It's better to do something
than to do nothing," is an obviously retarded general principle. Is it
really better to drive a nail through your head than to sit quietly for
a bit? It looks a bit like reductio ad absurdum, but when the general
principle is explicitly stated, I'm not even reducing it.

The history is wrong, as well; using that product of interactive
culture, wikipedia, I discover "The story arc of Andy's romance (and
subsequent problems) with the Harlem beautician Madame Queen entranced
some 40,000,000 listeners during 1930 and 1931, becoming a national
phenomenon." At the time, the population of the US was about 120
million. The popularity of the sitcom isn't a product of post-war
plenty; it's a product of the Great Depression.

It goes back further; sitting and listening to people telling
stories has always been a popular way to spend free time. Changing
technologies have changed the way in which people sit around and
listen, and it would certainly be possible to write a sensible essay
(or, for that matter, give a sensible talk) about how the internet is
turning a lot of one-to-many media into many-to-many media. But this
one isn't it.

I'm entirely willing to agree with Greg London @29 that time spent
on wikipedia is in a lot of ways equivalent to time spent watching TV.
But that's not the point that Shirky is making.

On the other hand, Randolph Fritz @28, you seem to have the end of
an argument without the first part. If I were to say, "since the US
consumes over nine billion pounds of cheese a year, given the amounts
consumed, it's pretty clear that a lot of cheese is used as a sedative,
and that it is overused," you'd think I was mad.

In order for the argument to stand, you need to show that cheese is
used as a sedative, and that the amounts consumed as a sedative are too
high, against some sort of standard. I'm willing to believe that's the
case, with either cheese or TV, but again, it's not the argument that
Shirky is making.

Posted April 28, 2008 10:11 AM by Alter S. Reiss

heresiarch @ 26

Is it that the common wisdom was wrong, or is it that the viewers have changed?

The common wisdom was wrong, the viewers were always ready for it*, and the writers and directors changed. The kind of stories they wanted to tell and felt confident that they could tell were different.

TNH @ 1

"Fans are Slans?" Hey, we knew the answer to that one a long time ago,
and we remember everytime our telepathic feelers tingle with the
approach of another one of us.

response to the original post

Several comments before this have either agreed with or taken issue
with the idea that television must be bad and the internet good. I
don't get that idea from the speech at all. I get that there is room in
people's heads for consumption and production and sharing and that
we're seeing the maturity of the technology of production and sharing,
which, largely for economic reasons, I think, had to come later.
There's no implication of morality or aesthetic quality, just more
opportunity.

Just to point out that ideas don't come out of nowhere, the google
crime map idea has been alive and well for years here in Portland. The
Tax Assessor's office has an online GIS map of property in the
Multnomah County area. Enter an address, get a map of the property,
with tax info and a bunch of buttons for showing sewer and gas lines,
crime statistics (broken out by type of crime), residences of sex
offenders, even aircraft noise contours.

* even back in the 50s and 60s when people talking around the water
cooler about last night's episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" would
compare it previous episodes, and draw conclusions about the characters
from the comparison.

Posted April 28, 2008 10:23 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

R.M. Koske @

Maybe the point isn't that we'll never sit and enjoy/partake in
non-interactive culture, but that we'll probably start making new
things of that culture as a matter of course.

and:

Huh. Aren't reviews, analysis and discussion of TV a much newer thing than television?

Yes and yes. Regarding the debatability, above, of whether that was
intended by the original article, it's what I took from it, whether or
not that was the intention. (Is that a sentence? The fact that I'm not
sure means I should go to sleep now.) Once the words leave the author
and hit the reader...

Bedtime, though. Really.

Posted April 28, 2008 10:26 AM by A. J. Luxton

Scott Taylor @ 24,

I'd say there's a bigger difference between tabletop RPGs and World
of Warcraft: the latter is *popular*. D&D was very interactive, but
it appealed to a smallish slice of the population. I will (biasedly)
claim that Zork is more interactive than most modern computer games
(multiplayer aspect aside), but Zork only appealed to a tiny slice of
the population. Stuff like that (and, sure, fandom) selected out the
verbal, creative types 25 years ago.

WoW, Livejournal, and cellphone texting are now drawing out the
creative and interactive tendencies in the wider population. (And if
you're worried about the D&D players, hey, they're still playing
D&D -- or DitV, or Nobilis.)

Posted April 28, 2008 11:20 AM by Andrew Plotkin

Oh my god, I just spent half an hour composing a reply to a bunch of
comments and then accidentally closed the window and lost it. I hate
everything. I may try again later.

Posted April 28, 2008 11:32 AM by ethan

Andrew Plotkin @ 39 -

Scott Taylor @ 24,

I'd say there's a bigger difference between tabletop RPGs and World
of Warcraft: the latter is *popular*. D&D was very interactive, but
it appealed to a smallish slice of the population. I will (biasedly)
claim that Zork is more interactive than most modern computer games
(multiplayer aspect aside), but Zork only appealed to a tiny slice of
the population. Stuff like that (and, sure, fandom) selected out the
verbal, creative types 25 years ago.

Oh, certainly - I wasn't commenting on their relative popularity
(believe me, as an RPG writer/developer, I'd love to have one
ten-thousandth the market share that WoW or Halo has - I'd be in the
top five designers in the industry!), merely on their varying levels of
interaction and creation-enabling (creation-enablement? I Are Verbing!
You Can Verb Too!).

WoW, Livejournal, and cellphone texting are now drawing out the
creative and interactive tendencies in the wider population. (And if
you're worried about the D&D players, hey, they're still playing
D&D -- or DitV, or Nobilis.)

Well, a lot of them are also playing WoW, in addition (or instead of) tabletop, for a variety of reasons.

Other than that, we appear to be in violent agreement - for various
reasons, D&D and the tabletop RPG market pretty much saturated its
environment years ago - partly through being 'the only game on the
block' for that sort of thing, partly for other reasons.

But the "Tabletop games are" (more accurately can be) "more
interactive, allow more creativity, etc. that vidya games" shibboleth
is, while still true for now, less so with every generation of online
game that comes out.

Posted April 28, 2008 12:05 PM by Scott Taylor

R.M. Koske @ 32: "In theory we could refill only from life
and nature, and never absorb narrative, but in practice that's silly
and unnecessarily limiting."

Goodness, I'd hope not! If we weren't allowed to recharge listening to narrative, well, we'd never get anywhere
interesting. It'd be like trying to build a wall without using that row
of stones you just laid; foundation after foundation without any upward
progress.

Scott H @ 35: "However, my feeling is that the speaker was
overlooking a key fact: even provided with superior tools, the vast
majority of people will never attempt to build anything."

I think you're missing two things:

1) Shirky's claim isn't that everyone will suddenly devote every
leisure hour to writing a novel/inventing cold fusion--only that, all
of a sudden, it will be much easier to do so. People might still only
choose to use 1% more of their leisure time in a productive fashion,
but that's still 1% improvement, and small percentages add up to a lot
of productivity when you're talking millions of people.

2) Productive activities are really fun. Really. They aren't
necessarily more fun than passive activities, I admit: a balance is
necessary. But the idea that people, minus the prod of economic
incentive, will sit around like blobs is itself the product of a
culture where leisure activity is already coded as passive. If
given an equal choice, a substantial number of people will choose to
devote a fair amount of their leisure time to productive endeavors.* Up
until now, that choice hasn't been equal. We've been piping convenient,
high-quality passive entertainment into people's homes--of course
people will overwhelmingly choose to be passive. Suddenly, that's
changing: now we're piping an interactive, productive medium into
people's living rooms. The cost of choosing a productive activity
versus choosing a passive one has massively shifted. As a result, a lot
more people are going to choose productivity.

*People produce all sorts of amazing things in their spare time--the
Special Theory of Relativity, for one. Really, the progress of science
up until the industrial revolution was almost entirely driven by
dudes** futzing around for the heck of it.

**used here in its West Coast gender inclusive usage (though not really)

Bruce Cohen @ 37: "The common wisdom was wrong, the viewers were always ready for it*, and the writers and directors changed."

It's possible. I am but an egg, and my perspective on it is severely
limited. There has likely always been a number of viewers who craved
for more continuity (it's pretty natural, I think), but I'm not sure
that the producers of the day were wrong to decide that it wasn't worth
it to risk turning off potential viewers with less-than-immediately
comprehensible plots. What has really changed, it seems to me, is our
viewing habits: it isn't unusual for people to schedule their lives
around a show, and when that isn't possible, there's always VCR (or now
Tivo). Even more critical is DVD collections and BitTorrent: suddenly
it's possible for anyone to catch up with that hot new drama they
missed the first season of. I think all of those factors have
contributed to making continuity a more attractive option.

Posted April 28, 2008 12:12 PM by heresiarch

I was going to contribute my thoughts, but then the opportunity to
produce rather than just consume filled me with such dread and
performance anxiety that I was unable to go on and so now I'm going to
go watch an episode of "Seinfeld".

Whew, what a relief.

Posted April 28, 2008 12:13 PM by Michael Weholt

Alter S. Reiss@36: If I were to say, "since the US consumes over
nine billion pounds of cheese a year, given the amounts consumed, it's
pretty clear that a lot of cheese is used as a sedative, and that it is
overused," you'd think I was mad.

Used to know a guy who was in charge of the boarding section of an
international school in Greece who absolutely swore by cheese as a
sedative. Dunno about the general population, though.

Posted April 28, 2008 12:38 PM by Adrian Smith

Back in the mid-90s, ISTR a local NJ tv station rebroadcasting a
talk which John Ciardi had given to a local elementary-school class. At
one point, he lamented the advent of radio serials during his
childhood: all of the neighborhood kids would be playing stickball,
jumprope etc. together outside in the afternoons until the time came
for the Tom Mix show or whatnot, and then everyone would vanish inside,
each to their own particular houses.

(OTOH, the early years of radio also brought about the widespread
popularity of classical music to a degree that seems almost
unimaginable today; whereas the excerpts in Fantasia and "The
Rabbit of Seville" may've originally played on the audience's presumed
pre-existing familiarity with those pieces, these days they're
practically the *only* exposure for much of the audience (including
me). Which is not to automatically overprivilege classical music above
other genres, but for the sake of the traditional highbrow stance (and
set of values) that popular media is inherently mindless and vulgar....)

Meanwhile, even within the medium of television, isn't the ~!990s
"recent invention of serial narrative" claim rather overlooking several
decades of daytime soap operas?

Posted April 28, 2008 1:02 PM by Julie L.

ethan @22:

"Tell any Star Trek fanfic writer that television isn't a participatory art form. Tell people who spend their lives in academic dissections of Buffy that they're wasting their time, or not contributing anything."

People do tell fans that, all the time. I think that participatory
fandom is another one of those "where do they find the time?" things.
Somehow, spending a lot of time watching television is normal (albeit
an activity that many people look down their noses at), but spending a
lot of time engaging with the television you watch and producing
thoughtful responses is weird, obsessive, and the kind of thing people
do when they have too much time on their hands. Even the creators of a
lot of shows have this attitude toward their fans -- Aaron Sorkin, for
instance, wrote his issues with fans right into a couple of West Wing episodes.

Posted April 28, 2008 1:31 PM by Jen Roth

Greg, #29: The piece I quoted, the piece that really struck me as
getting at something, was that the TV person couldn't understand where
someone could find the time to contribute to wikipedia.

Yes, exactly. That's the bit that jumped out at me, too; my
immediate reaction was considerably ruder, along the lines of, "They
have the time because they're not watching TV, you idiot!" Seriously,
it was as though the interviewer just assumed that there's a certain minimum amount of time every day that people have to spend in front of the TV screen, in addition to everything else in their lives.

Perhaps I'm sensitized to this by virtue of not having been a heavy
TV consumer since I got out of college; I'm accustomed to having people
think I'm weird for not spending hours a night parked in front of a TV
screen, and have been known to point out that I'm actually doing just
as much sitting in front of a screen as they are, but it's a computer
screen!

Posted April 28, 2008 1:51 PM by Lee

Julie@#45 beat me to it! Soap operas have had continuity since they
were on the radio in the 30s. Serial shorts in the movie theater did
too. I think the "reset button" style (which I have no problem with
whatsoever--both modes are lots of fun) is rather newer.

Speaking of things I think but have no evidence of, Scott H@#35
says, "the vast majority of people will never attempt to build
anything", but my "problem" with this talk was rather that I think they
always have, it's just gotten easier to share/show it off. I say this
making no distinction between gardening, memorizing baseball
statistics, perfecting your barbecueing technique, building
supercomputers in your apartment, knitting, and editing
Wikipedia--almost everyone has some hobby. Just because you or I don't
find it interesting or valuable doesn't mean it's not creation. The
suggestion that "the average person" hasn't been creative in their free
time until recently struck me as wrong. But the scope of things you can
easily and cheaply do has certainly expanded in recent years, that's
true.

Posted April 28, 2008 1:55 PM by individualfrog

From where my generation stands, this all looks wonderful and
exciting and obvious once it's pointed out (I'm 27, and many of my
friends are a few years younger than me).

I'm not knocking television (and I agree with those above who say
that Shirky is not really doing so either), but TV just isn't a
priority for us. A lot of the people I play WoW with don't watch a lot
of TV. Many of them don't even have cable - the possession of high
speed internet INSTEAD of cable is something I would never have
anticipated, but it seems to be an obvious choice for a lot of people I
know. If you can only afford one, the internet wins every time (of
course that may be because of netflix and pirate media and
downloadables and shows being on the network websites the day after,
but the point stands.)

The best example of this new world I can think of is a voice chat
program called Ventrillo. A group of friends will essentially buy a big
server and set up a password to it. Within this server is any number of
rooms. And there you are, in a room talking to 2-200 of your closest
friends (though for actual conversation, it rapidly looses feasibility
over 20).

I've actually gotten to the point where I go home and I log into
Ventrillo, even if I'm not going to be playing World of Warcraft. It's
a medium somewhere between the phone and sitting in a room with your
friends. Whereas being on the phone pressures you to say something, to
confirm you're still on the line, it's possible to lapse into 20
minutes of companionable silence on Ventrillo, only to suddenly say,
for instance:

"Oh my God, I just saw this awesome video. It's about cognitive
surplus and television and the industrial revolution and... squeeeee.
Hold on a second... check my comment, and go watch it."

In that time I've found an isolated link to the video and used
Ventrillo's interface to attach a link to it to my current username.
Twenty minutes later, most of the other people in the channel have
watched it, and we're having a conversation about free time and the
internet and MMOs and local stigma against pen and paper roleplaying
(interesting side-note: both young men in the channel with me had been
told as children that D&D was satanic.)

And with the introduction of something like Vent, or guild chat, or
IRC, even passive absorption of something becomes more. I remember in
the past watching shows at home, and noticing something, and wanting to
tell someone about it, but being utterly unable to. It was
maddening. Now I know that there will be someone to talk to about it.
Hell, sometimes I'm online at midnight when xkcd or Girl Genius
updates, and my friends all refresh them together, and talk about the
new stuff. If that isn't a bleeding edge combination of passive
absorption and actually doing something, I don't know what is.

A friend of mine from WoW said "you know, I know that I'd be a lot
less social if I didn't play WoW." He went on to say that people
probably think it's weird, that playing an online game is being social.
But it's true... before WoW there were maybe five people who I'd have a
lengthy conversation with at least once a week. Now there are something
like twenty.

Posted April 28, 2008 1:55 PM by Leah Miller

Wai-wai-waitaminnit! Was Claude Degler from New Castle?? Are you telling me I grew up ten miles from an actual science-fiction fan and thought I was alone in the world?

(Aside: maybe I'm a Muncie Mutant. I was born there, after all. And it would explain a lot.)

@16 Randolph - not the end, not even the beginning of the end; just the end of the beginning.

Posted April 28, 2008 2:10 PM by Michael Roberts

The social aspect is one of the things I miss most about playing
WoW, actually. I had a bunch of friends online that I could count on
typing to, if not every day, at least every raid night, and now I
rarely hear from them. Which I guess says something about how good of
friends they were, but these are people that I went on to meet in real
life, have dinner with, lent me boxes when I moved across the
country... They were some of the people I talked to the most. Of
course, I quit playing WoW so that I could spend more time creating -
sewing, gardening and cross stitching. Not that it always works out
that way. I seem to be spending a great deal of time playing spider
solitaire, which I haven't done since college.

And yes, we chose to have high speed internet over cable. The amount
of money cable cost per hour watched just didn't seem worth it.

Posted April 28, 2008 2:17 PM by EClaire

I wonder if soap operas didn't continue with serial stories long
after nearly every other medium gave them up because adults who stay
home with children have a bigger cognative surplus than the rest of us.
I know my sister with her two small children has been quite starved for
grown-up stimulation. She's too tired and busy to read, but a serial
show that develops slowly might be something that you could follow as
the rest of life went on, especially if you managed to make that hour
be the children's naptime.

Posted April 28, 2008 2:29 PM by R. M. Koske

Bruce Cohen @37: Just to point out that ideas don't come out of
nowhere, the google crime map idea has been alive and well for years
here in Portland. The Tax Assessor's office has an online GIS map of
property in the Multnomah County area. Enter an address, get a map of
the property, with tax info and a bunch of buttons for showing sewer
and gas lines, crime statistics (broken out by type of crime),
residences of sex offenders, even aircraft noise contours.

Do you have any links? I'm moving to Portland in July and this info would be lovely to have on hand.

An aside: Making a request like this would not be possible if this
information were delivered via the nightly news. assuming the news
could get their collective thumbs out of their collective asses and
stop talking about lapel pins and bowling long enough to deliver actual
information.

Posted April 28, 2008 2:39 PM by Keith

heresiarch @26: As much as I love the Simpsons, the fact that
everyone forgets everything they learned last episode frustrates the
bejeezus out of me.

I get the principal you are applying but your example is just a little off. One of the internally consistent rules of The Simpson's
universe is that it's characters don't learn from episode to episode
and regularly comment on this fact. It's a tad meta but it's a
conscious decision to subvert the stupidity of the sit-com medium by
having the characters realize they are doing repetitive, stupid things
for dramatic reasons but unable or unwilling to act otherwise. Lucy and
Ethel would never pause to wonder why they keep getting into wacky
mishaps while Bart and Lisa do this, if not constantly, at least
occasionally.

And this is one of the points Clay Shirky was making: that we now
have the skills as a culture to not only make these sorts of self
referential critiques but we now expect them to be made, if not by us,
then by a meta-narrative stand in (Comic Book Guy on The Simpson's does this, which is why he has no name).

Posted April 28, 2008 2:49 PM by Keith

Individualfrog, #48: Indeed. My partner just cued up this
for me. One of the things we discussed afterwards was that this sort of
thing has always been happening, but until YouTube came along, the only
way we'd have seen it was (1) to know these guys and have been around
while they were jamming, (2) to have seen them at a coffeehouse or
open-mike, or (3) for them to have been busking on a street corner when
we were passing by. There was no non-commercial wide-distribution
channel for creative people to use.

EClaire, #51: Sing it, sistah! Springsteen's "57 Channels and
Nothin' On" isn't a patch on today's cable networks. But the biggest
problem isn't so much a lack of content as the amount of garbage that
we'd have to pay for to get the few things we might want. The first
cable network that decides to price every channel individually and let
customers select just the things they want to watch (aka a build-your-own package) will make a friggin' mint.

Posted April 28, 2008 2:51 PM by Lee

We used to be able to do that when we used an actual satellite dish
- order channels a la carte. Now, to get Speed and Versus (so I can
watch Formula 1 and my dad can watch the bicycle racing) you have to
get Dish Networks 250 channel package - which is over $500 a year.
Sure, I watch Animal Planet occasionally, and try to catch The Daily
Show and the Colbert Report whenever I can wrench the remote away from
my dad around 10. But it's a good thing he's paying for the TV, because
I certainly wouldn't. (There may also be an argument for not moving
back in with someone who is used to leaving the TV on during all waking
hours - the sheer noise of it makes me crazy.)

Posted April 28, 2008 3:02 PM by EClaire

#36: It's not possible to read that as anything other than a
condemnation of non-interactive entertainment. Reading a novel -- any
novel -- is worse than grinding your way through a level or two on WoW.
Watching a TV show -- any TV show -- is worse than arguing about gun
control on Usenet.

It is quite possible to take it otherwise. IMO, you have taken
quotes out of context and twisted the speaker's meaning. He clearly
likes the idea of people taking *some* of their passive consuming time
and devoting it to creating for others. He really isn't trying to pry
your novels away from you.

Posted April 28, 2008 3:05 PM by Tazistan Jen

Julie @ #45, WRT classical music on the radio, back in the day.

It was an immensely huge deal when NBC Radio got Arturo Toscanini to
agree to conduct their orchestra for a series on concerts; a lot of
people had thought they were wasting their time asking, that the great
conductor would never deign to mix with the new medium. Not only did
Toscanini agree to their deal, he stayed with them for over fifteen
years, until he retired from conducting; Leopold Stowkowski also worked
for NBC. The Saturday afternoon New York Metropolitan Opera broadcasts
may be one of the last vestiges of the old classical music programming
that people like David Sarnoff and the other early executives felt were
"what the people wanted"--or at least, what they would be willing to
listen to.

But I see where the Met has made the leap to satellite radion, so it's far from over.

Posted April 28, 2008 3:17 PM by fidelio

Look, a post of many subjects! Whee!

@EClaire and Lee, on the subject of TV

Oh gods, a la carte networks on a shifting, impulse-buy system would be
fantastic. I mostly watch Comedy Central with some limited Four
Networks/Bravo/History/Discovery. Every once in a while though there'll
be something I want to watch on IFC or one of the other "ha ha, you'll
only get this with six tiers of cable, sucker" channels. I can see
going without, say, USA for months, resubscribing while Monk was in new
episodes, and then dropping it again.

@heresiarch #26 and Keith #54

I'll have to agree that the Simpsons is very active in making fun of
the continuity dump. This quote from Homer was one of my favorite jokes
from the show in the last few years:

"I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life: boxer, mascot, astronaut, baby
proofer, imitation Krusty, truck driver, hippie, plow driver, food
critic, conceptual artist, grease salesman, carny, mayor, grifter, body
guard for the mayor, country western manager, garbage commissioner,
mountain climber, farmer, inventor, Smithers, Poochie, celebrity
assistant, power plant worker, fortune cookie writer, beer baron,
Kwik-E-Mart clerk, homophobe, and missionary, but protecting people,
that gives me the best feeling of all."

That, along with the exchange:

"Do you even have a job anymore?"

"I think it's pretty obvious that I don't."

Were incredible, meta moments that rewarded fans and let you breathe.

And finally,

@EClair #51

On the transition from online friends to other-kinds-of-friends, it is
tough, and immensely more work than maintaining friendships that
started IRL. I do believe it's possible; though whether or not they
survive really depends on how much time surplus either of you have
beyond the games you play, and how much you have in common beyond the
game.

I was talking with a friend from WoW who doesn't play anymore about
a raid we were on, and he said "yeah, Raidleaderguy came over to my
house after and told me about it." In that case they have boring,
small-town proximity to help them, but there are other things.

Heh, I actually became much closer to one of my friends from WoW
after he quit, as he now didn't have as many people to talk to or as
much to distract him from his problems, so we ended up having more time
to talk.

It's really hard to predict who I end up keeping and who I lose. But
I have a bigger pool to draw from, and a far far higher success rate
than other purely online means of forming friendships.

I apologize for the chaotic and rambling nature of my comments in
this thread. This is just a subject that I'm so involved in and there
are so many possible implications - I can't calm my brain down for very
long.

Posted April 28, 2008 3:20 PM by Leah Miller

Keith @54--Re: "self referential critiques" and meta-narrative
features. _Tristram Shandy_, for starters. Jump a century and a half
and there's _Six Characters in Search of an Author_ and Buster Keaton's
_Sherlock, Jr._ and any number of Warner Bros. cartoons, right up to
the Goon Show and Monty Python. Neither programmers nor Escher invented
recursion, any more than contemporary TV producers invented the story
arc. (Dickens, anyone?)

Posted April 28, 2008 3:25 PM by Russell Letson

And Chaucer wrote himself (or a Chaucer-persona) into -The Canturbury Tales_. Drasty riming, indeed.

Posted April 28, 2008 3:29 PM by Russell Letson

Russell Letson @60: While TV producers didn't invent recursion or
serialized story arcs, they've brought it to a large enough audience
where it's absence is now considered a flaw. That's big. Children's
programs now have the same or better continuity than a serilaized
Dickens novel. 150 years ago, children's entertainment was nonexistent
and mass media was a Punch and Judy puppet show.

Posted April 28, 2008 3:57 PM by Keith

Neither. Technology and business changed. Reset-zero shows dominated
an era when if you didn't see a show on first broadcast, you wouldn't
have another chance to see it unless the entire series was repeated on
the same channel, and that wouldn't happen for a long time. So if a
show depended on you watching every presentation in sequence, it would
drop viewers at every broadcast as the next batch of people who had
something else to do one particular night got left behind.

Three things changed:

1. Widespread distribution of series boxsets

2. VHS, Tivo and other view on demand/home recording technologies

3. Non-network channel proliferation, leading to airtime becoming less
precious, leading in turn to the practise of repeating each episode
multiple times within the span of the series.

Of these, I think the third is the most significant - the VHS
recorder was obviously important, but it still places the onus on the
audience to be such big fans of a show that they will plan their lives
around it, even if only to pre-arrange a recording. But with multiple
repeats of an episode each week, the audience has many opportunities to
watch an episode without having to make any major personal effort.

There's a tradeoff in play: if every episode in a series is
important, some people will make an additional effort to watch every
episode (rather than just watching some), but some people will watch no
(or fewer) episodes because they won't or don't want to make that
effort. In the post-war era, the limited availability of repeats meant
that a continuity-heavy series would lose more viewers than it gained,
losing money. But in the past twenty years, the greater availability of
airtime and repeats have significantly shifted that balance, and hence
made continuity-heavy shows more profitable.

Soap operas are a bit of a special case. Firstly, they tend to be
targetted at an audience which is able to (and wants to) take daily
structure from a viewing schedule, and to do this they tend to use
timeslots which are rich in this kind of audience: early afternoon or
early evening. Additionally, they tend to be continuity-light rather
than continuity-heavy - key parts of story arcs are deliberately
plotted across multiple shows so that it's possible to miss one or
shows without falling disorientingly behind on even one storyline.

Posted April 28, 2008 4:37 PM by Jp

Tazistan Jen @ 57.

It's possible that I'm extra special grumpy this evening, because
both my router and my wireless mouse are acting up, leaving me,
ironically enough, to the mercy of recorded TV shows for most of my
amusement.

And yet, when I managed to get through to the essay, it seems to say
what I remember it saying: a lot of TV is really dumb, and
collaborative internet projects are really neat. And, honestly, it's
hard to argue with either of those premises. There's a hell of a lot of
dumb TV, and there are a great many interesting things being done on
the internet.

All the same, I think the framework in which he's assimilating those
ideas is fundamentally wrong. He sees our attachment to sitcoms as a
reaction to plenty, whereas the sitcom became a popular form during a
time of want. And I think that's a significant error. TV isn't where
people go to escape the possibility of having fun; it's where they go
to retreat from more stringent demands.

I don't think that anyone's trying to take the novels from my hands.
I don't even think that Shirky looks down on reading novels; he paints
TV as being a specific remedy to a specific problem. The problem being
that people would accomplish too much with their free time, and the
remedy that TV provides being wasting people's free time without
accomplishing anything.

I think that the logic of his arguments leads inescapably to the
valorization of any interactive activity over any passive consumption
of entertainment. And that's dumb.

In what context does "a screen that ships without a mouse ships
broken" not indicate a fundamental sense that interactive modes of
entertainment are superior to passive modes?

I'd go on in this vein, but I despair: If quoting three successive
paragraphs in their entirety is taking quotes out of context, and if
treating an explicit statement of a general principle as a statement of
a general principle is twisting the speaker's meaning, I'm not sure how
to reference my arguments in the text at all.

The frustrating thing about the essay is that I don't disagree with
most of Shirky's conclusions; I think that his argument goes off the
rails in a couple of places, and I think that he misses the opportunity
to talk about some really interesting stuff.

I mean, there wasn't a big media brute squad keeping him in that
basement, watching Gilligan's Island. He could have written novels or
fanzines or letters to various editors. Or, for that matter, he could
have been playing the piano, or playing ball or rolling a barrel hoop
along with a stick, or whatever kids did back then. He was watching
Gilligan's Island because it was the most attractive entertainment
option available at the time.

And I think it's really neat, the way ease of publishing and ease of
finding stuff is shifting things so that activities more productive
than watching Gilligan's Island are becoming attractive entertainment
options.

But I don't think that Shirky's essay really gets to the meat of
that. I think the "cognitive surplus" thing isn't defensible, except in
the broadest terms -- certainly, treating lots of free time as a 20th
century phenomenon shows a profound ignorance of history. I think the
idea that TV is uniquely useless to be at best foolhardy and at worst
pernicious, and it's very hard to miss that idea in the essay.

In short: No I'm not.

Posted April 28, 2008 4:46 PM by Alter S. Reiss

#63

Soap opera story arcs used to be slow enough that you could pretty
much follow it on one show per week: they'd do a review of last week's
story, then start this week's story, plus there were reviews of the
previous day's story every day. Result: ten or fifteen minutes of
storyline in a half-hour show.

(My grandmother watched some of them.)

Posted April 28, 2008 4:58 PM by P J Evans

Alter S. Reiss @ #64

I'd like to watch the whole clip again and put out some
counterarguments to your interpretation in general, but right now I
only have the time to answer the one specific, explicit question you
ask. And I think I ramble on long enough.

In what context does "a screen that ships without a mouse ships
broken" not indicate a fundamental sense that interactive modes of
entertainment are superior to passive modes?

Replace, in this case, 'mouse' with 'advanced interaction device' or
even 'sufficiently developed and modern remote,' as they are pretty
much the same thing. The little girl is probably simply much more
familiar with the mouse, it's a more flexible and sophisticated input
mechanism than the remote, and requires less advanced
learning/reading/numbers to use. However they are fundamentally the
same: a device to allow you to manipulate the 'thing.'

I'm thinking here specifically of a TiVo/DVR remote. For fun (or eternal and constant aggravation), try watching a show like Lost on a DVD or DVR for the first two seasons. Then switch to live broadcast sans-DVR.

It is maddening and broken feeling at that point, at least to me,
even though it is the same thing: a passive mode of entertainment. My
Lost-watching-friend and I are so used to being able to freeze frame,
rewind a bit and make sure we heard what someone was saying, or even
just pause and say "HOLY CRAP DID YOU SEE THAT? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?" and
have a five minute discussion before resuming. And now we can't.

A TV that ships without a DVR ships broken to me now. Not un-usably
broken, but lacking - like a clock without a snooze alarm, or a
tape-recorder without a fast-forward button.

The mouse, the tivo, the screencap of the document on the desk...
whether you're solving some mystery of what is really going on in Lost or catching a throwaway gag on the Simpsons, being able to manipulate the media on some level is essential.

Add to that the fact that we've sometimes watched the Lost Pop-up rebroadcasts with Lostwiki open, and you begin to see where you are, if you are us. Our cries, (cries, monseigneur!)of 'have you seen that show Lost?' echo throughout our office, our lives, our World of Warcraft guilds. We are tirelessly devoted to passive absorption of that story.

But there is still some activity that I would categorize as 'mouse related.'

Maybe you are fortunate enough to have someone within shouting
distance with whom you can discuss every single program you like. Or
maybe you don't feel the need to talk about TV or novels, but merely
enjoy them solo. That's not wrong.

But for me the 'mouse' he is speaking of is the mouse of distance
communication. It is the mouse of pauses and instant replays. It is the
mouse of DVD special commentary. It is the mouse of customizable
access.

It is the 'mouse' I reach for when I'm reading the book that my
friend recommended and I get to that one part and I want to tell him
that that part was amazing. It is the mouse I reach for when I get to a
panel of a comic that I think would make an excellent LJ icon.

It is not saying other tools are bad. It is saying "A word processor
without a tab key is a broken word processor." Tab is not the only tool
in the world. It is not even the only tool for formatting paragraphs.
It is, however, a very useful thing that people like and would miss
were it gone. I know this from a few situations where I have been stuck
with a computer that was only equipped with notepad for typing. Notepad
may have once been all you needed out of a word processor. It may still
be all you need for some uses. But to the modern user it is, in many
ways, broken.

And after all this, I still consider my time spent watching Lost as a 'passive' activity.

And that is how, to me, an uber-connected fan-crazy, hyper-literate
twentysomething... that phrase totally did NOT indicate a fundamental
sense that interactive modes of entertainment were superior to passive
ones.

Heh. I didn't mean to rant, but hopefully you have a bit better idea of what it looks like from in here?

Posted April 28, 2008 5:49 PM by Leah Miller

As someone highly fannish and mostly involved in several TV show
fandoms I couldn't help but bristle at the TV watching is passive!
comments in the thing.

It can be but it isn't always. Not really. Fanfic, reading and
writing and commenting, vidding, meta and discussions all springs from
actively watching the TV shows.

I do find interesting though a poll I saw on LJ a while back asking
fans about their TV viewing habits and most people there didn't really
watch any 'normal' TV because they found it not as fun and didn't
really want to spend their time on shows or tv stuff that they weren't
fannish about.

Posted April 28, 2008 6:20 PM by Sica

So:

If there is video of Clay Shirky from the Web Two Point Oh Expo, where is the video of Teresa?

Posted April 28, 2008 7:34 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

Keith @ 54: Comic Book Guy on The Simpson's does this, which is why he has no name

His name is Jeff Albertson. Though that is a relatively recent development.

PJ Evans @ 63: Soap opera story arcs used to be slow enough that you could pretty much follow it on one show per week.

My mother used to do exactly that. Once a week, after washing
clothes, she would set up the ironing board in front of the television
and watch while she ironed and folded. I think it was just to alleviate
the tedium of the ironing rather than from any real interest in the
stories - I know she didn't always watch. One of my earliest memories
is of asking her what the men on the TV were doing. "They're going to
the moon." I don't think I'm completely over how awesome that seemed
yet.

I wish they would bring that show back. What's Ron Moore doing next year?

Sica @ 67:

Those things do grow from actively watching but they're not
inherently there in the original medium. You make that interactivity
and by doing so (and deriving so much more from it than from the show
alone) you're demonstrating a part of Shirky's thesis: Doing something
is better than doing nothing.

The fanfic writers and commenters, the vidders and all the
communities that have sprung up around them, especially those that did
so before the intertubes were plugged into every home, are the
beginning of what Shirky is on about. Because it wasn't inherent in the
medium, you had to make the interactivity yourselves. You're the ones
blazing the trail into interactivityland without the technology that
the rest of the world will use to follow you. It's why, when everyone
else got online, they found the internet was already full of nerds.
Shirky wasn't talking to you because you're already there.

Posted April 28, 2008 7:55 PM by Paul Duncanson

Holy cow, do I ever think some of you are bristling unnecessarily
over the TV thing. I watch about twenty times more TV now than I did
ten years ago, because TV has changed. The TV you're defending the watching of isn't the TV Shirky is remembering from his childhood, and mine.

And for that matter, even when Shirky is deprecating that kind of
TV, he's doing so with a lot of gentleness and understanding. It feels
to me like some of you are looking for offense where none was
proffered.

Posted April 28, 2008 8:04 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

And by the way, I don't think there's anything inherently bad about
burying one's self in an immersive narrative, and I'll bet the rent
Clay Shirky doesn't think so either. I make my living developing and
selling those immersive narratives, I remind you.

Shirky is observing that if just one percent of the time
and energy devoted to watching TV gets redirected to more interactive
pursuits, that's a potentially a huge social change. This seems like a
fair comment--about the dynamic of small shifts with big consequences,
among other things--and a long way from the wholesale condemnation of
"watching TV" or "reading fiction" that some people are discerning in
his talk. It's an interesting point even if you stipulate that there's
nothing inherently more virtuous about "interactive" pursuits as
opposed to any other sort.

Posted April 28, 2008 8:11 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

ethan: re comments and loss, That is why I started using notepad to
compose comments. If I try to close it by mistake nothing terrible
happens; it asks if I want to save the text.

General: I have problems with some of the reactions people have to my
use of the computer. If I'm crunching images, or doing various sorts of
e-mail, that's "productive." If I'm blogging, or reading that's seen as
not productive.

The end result (an informed me, who can talk about things) isn't seen as connected.

Gardening (even the simple task of watering) is seen as productive.

Even my passive time (watching the Dodgers on television) is time I
spend online; which just re-inforces the idea that the computer is just
about as meaningful as pointless television.

Leah Miller: The sidenote is appallingly common. I stopped counting
the number of times I was told D&D was satanic before I hit 17. I
don't doubt that it still has that accusation, but I don't find it all
that surprising either.

Lee: The closest you come to the build your own model is satellite.
Since cable companies get a limited monopoly, they make a mint
regardless.

Posted April 28, 2008 8:29 PM by Terry Karney

Paul @ 69

I remember spending a couple or three weeks with Granny in the
summer of 1973 - she was getting ready to sell her house - and
watching, depending on what day it was, either soaps or Watergate
hearings. Educational television?

Posted April 28, 2008 9:43 PM by P J Evans

Alter R. Reiss (#36): I was lucky enough to see the speech live. When he said the bit about LOLcats, I thought, "Hey! Why's he dissing LOLcats?! I like LOLcats! They're fun!"

But now that I read the text, I think I misinterpreted it entirely.
I think Clay likes LOLcats too -- or, at least, approves of them.
That's his point: They're slight, but they're fun, and now, with the
tools afforded by the PC and Internet, anyone can do them and
distribute them worldwide, therefore contributing some small quantum to
the amount of creativity and joy in the world.

Similarly: I've done some building in Second Life. I am Second
Life's Most Inept Builder, but still I've created a couple of things,
and been proud of them, too, because I think of myself as completely
inept in the visual arts so if I can create a structure in Second Life
that stands up and doesn't make people want to throw up, then I
consider it a triumph.

Patrick (#70 & 71): I interpreted Clay's comments on TV the same way you did - it wasn't an indictment of all TV, just the really bad. TV.

And even if Clay is dismissing all TV, I can disagree with that portion while still finding his message extremely valuable.

I watch TV more efficiently now, thanks to TiVo. I never, ever
channel-surf and find myself watching something I don't like, just
because it's the only watchable thing on. I used to do that far more
often. Now, I have a whole lot of stuff I'll enjoy piled up on TiVo,
and if I feel like watching TV, I'll watch some of that. And I only
watch commercials if they capture my interest.

Back in the 80s, I worked at a daily newspaper, on the swing shift,
getting off work about 1-2 am every day. Other reporters and editors
were able to go home and go right to bed, but not me -- I'd be bouncing
off the walls for hours. Couldn't sleep. And this was in the
country, there was nothing to do after midnight except get drunk, fight
or fornicate. I wasn't much a fan of the first two, and my girlfriend
worked days. I could only read so much, so I watched a lot of TV.
Sometimes I was so desperate for entertainment I watched Charlie Rose twice; they ran the show for two hours after the entertainment talk show went off the air, and then they ran it immediately again.

And sometimes I look back and think, man, if only we'd had Internet access then.

Patrick, when I heard Clay's speech I thought of you, specifically a
comment you made years ago about how our society doesn't recognize the
importance of creative play.

Posted April 28, 2008 9:44 PM by Mitch Wagner

Terry Karney, 72, said:

Lee: The closest you come to the build your own model is satellite.
Since cable companies get a limited monopoly, they make a mint
regardless.

The closest you can come is Netflix + itunes video + unauthorized
streaming video + bittorrent + irc. Yes, yes, helpy, not helpful, but
there you go.

also,

I've been meaning to reply to a couple three people on the
Indistinguishable from parody thread, but I have been overtaken by
ennui. I think fond thoughts of all of you, but I am so...drained.

Posted April 28, 2008 9:45 PM by don delny

Alter R. Reiss (#36): I was lucky enough to see the speech live. When he said the bit about LOLcats, I thought, "Hey! Why's he dissing LOLcats?! I like LOLcats! They're fun!"

But now that I read the text, I think I misinterpreted it entirely.
I think Clay likes LOLcats too -- or, at least, approves of them.
That's his point: They're slight, but they're fun, and now, with the
tools afforded by the PC and Internet, anyone can do them and
distribute them worldwide, therefore contributing some small quantum to
the amount of creativity and joy in the world.

Similarly: I've done some building in Second Life. I am Second
Life's Most Inept Builder, but still I've created a couple of things,
and been proud of them, too, because I think of myself as completely
inept in the visual arts so if I can create a structure in Second Life
that stands up and doesn't make people want to throw up, then I
consider it a triumph.

Patrick (#70 & 71): I interpreted Clay's comments on TV the same way you did - it wasn't an indictment of all TV, just the really bad. TV.

And even if Clay is dismissing all TV, I can disagree with that portion while still finding his message extremely valuable.

I watch TV more efficiently now, thanks to TiVo. I never, ever
channel-surf and find myself watching something I don't like, just
because it's the only watchable thing on. I used to do that far more
often. Now, I have a whole lot of stuff I'll enjoy piled up on TiVo,
and if I feel like watching TV, I'll watch some of that. And I only
watch commercials if they capture my interest.

Back in the 80s, I worked at a daily newspaper, on the swing shift,
getting off work about 1-2 am every day. Other reporters and editors
were able to go home and go right to bed, but not me -- I'd be bouncing
off the walls for hours. Couldn't sleep. And this was in the
country, there was nothing to do after midnight except get drunk, fight
or fornicate. I wasn't much a fan of the first two, and my girlfriend
worked days. I could only read so much, so I watched a lot of TV.
Sometimes I was so desperate for entertainment I watched Charlie Rose twice; they ran the show for two hours after the entertainment talk show went off the air, and then they ran it immediately again.

And sometimes I look back and think, man, if only we'd had Internet access then.

Patrick, when I heard Clay's speech I thought of you, specifically a
comment you made years ago about how our society doesn't recognize the
importance of creative play.

BTW, I'm sympathetic to the notion that prospective writers should
be discouraged, but in a completely different context and for
completely different reasons than the Times.

Posted April 28, 2008 9:47 PM by Mitch Wagner

And immediately after clicking send on that last message, I came across this: From the Mozilla blog.

The Tron guy is a symbol of everything that's great about the
Internet. He put his brain cells and hands to solving a problem for the
sheer joy of solving it -- there's absolutely no practical purpose to
what he did. Moreover, I suspect he knows he looks ridiculous, and
doesn't care. Go, Tron Guy!

Posted April 28, 2008 9:52 PM by Mitch Wagner

Jp, #63: I'm not sure your initial premise -- that Before VCRs
people would stop watching a sequential show altogether if they missed
an episode -- is correct. If they'd been watching right along, and just
happened to miss one episode, they could pick up what happened either
by inference the followi