Apr 26th, 2008

What are you doing with your social surplus?

Here’s a great article by Clay Shirky about how much time society spends “consuming” content (in this case, watching trillions of hours of television each year), in lieu of producing content — from creating a lolcat to editing a Wikipedia entry. I wonder where he would draw the line, however, in what constitutes a waste of social surplus. Is watching the news on TV still a waste, or is it just a waste if it’s mindless entertainment like sitcoms? What about reading a book, or playing a videogame? Or reading a web site, as opposed to contributing to a web site (in the form of comments, editing content, etc.)? I see where he’s going with his thesis, but it seems like a slippery slope.

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