Sitcoms are “Cognitive Heatsinks”

Here Comes Everybody

Clay Shirkyon, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has an excellent post up, titled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, where he calls television sitcoms a “cognitive heat sink,” which dissipate our thought potential, preventing us from putting our over-abundance of free time to use in intellectually-productive activities. (Don’t have an “over-abundance of free time?” If you watch TV you do.)

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. … 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.

Shirky does the math on how many human-hours have gone into writing Wikipedia, and discovers that, for the amount of time we spend watching television, we could produce “2,000 Wikipedia projects a year.” Collective enterprises like Wikipedia and the intertwingularity of Web 2.0 activities are all part of the emerging “Participation Culture,” which values inclusive media over hierarchical mediums, and it’s not just a fad:

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. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

Those of use who grew up without computers and the Internet have an excuse for the way we struggle to break our old-media habits. There’s no excuse for constraining our children with them too.