29 Apr 08 General

RE: How Do People Find The Time To Watch Television?

“…for the first time, society forced on an enormous number of people the requirement to manage something they’ve never had to manage before…which was free time. And what did we do with that free time? Mostly we panicked and spent it watching TV.” – Clay Shirky

A nice reminder on what is actually active and social:

“People still spend a huge amount of time consuming passive media like television. If even a small fraction of that mental energy was diverted to more active pursuits, it could lead to the production of dozens of socially-beneficial efforts like Wikipedia. The problem isn’t finding people with time on their hands; we’ve got tens of millions of those. The challenge is finding socially-beneficial projects that they’ll enjoy participating in more than re-runs of Seinfeld.” – Timothy Lee

One comment

  1. John F. Schneider
    29 April 2008 at 1:29 pm

    Two very powerful commentaries on our relationship to legacy media. As individuals we need to reclaim this time and direct it, utilize it, to actually be of benefit to us. Individually and collectively. That isn’t to say there isn’t great programming, as there most certainly is, but television used without control, without purpose, is a vampire.

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