Stormy's Corner

Should we make stuff instead of watching tv?

I just read an interesting article by Clay Shirky, Gin, Television and Social Surplus. He says that we have a social surplus right now. In the early industrial revolution, people had surplus time, so they drank gin. He says we eventually figured out how to use our time with more education, public libraries and museums. We had another social surplus around World War II and the 40 hour work week and we used the extra time to watch TV. Clay Shirky argues that we are just now beginning to use some of that time more productively in producing knowledge  As an example, he says if we used 1% of our TV watching time writing content, we'd produce the equivalent of Wikipedia ever year!

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 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

He makes a call for every content producer (like tv) to have a mechanism for users to interact, produce and share knowledge. Here's his story to prove his point:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD.  And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen.  That seems like a cute moment.  Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever.  But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables.  And her dad said, "What you doing?"  And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

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.

How much of your free time do you spend watching tv? How much do you spend producing something?

What's causing our kids to become autistic, fat, near-sighted and sleep deprived?

TV!  This latest study found that watching TV lowers melatonin levels which can create all sorts of nasty side effects in children.  This study (as others) linked TV watching in kids to:

• autism
• obesity
• trouble sleeping
• eye problems
• lower melatonin levels
• early puberty

In adults, "the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease increases with each extra daily hour of television viewing among people aged 20 to 60."

Watching TV must give people immense pleasure ... otherwise I can't imagine why they would expose themselves and their kids to so much of it. We spend nine months of pregnancy trying to eat right, drink no alcohol, get all sorts of prenatal tests and then we plop our toddlers down in front of another round of SpongeBob or Thomas the Tank Engine without a second thought.

CSI goof: There is no Ruger 10/22 .223 caliber

We are watching CSI Miami and Frank is having a hard time ... he wants me to know that there is no Ruger 10/22 .223 caliber gun.  This isn't the first time they've talked about a gun that Frank says doesn't exist. 

He even went and got a shell that goes into his Ruger 10/22 and a .223 shell and showed me how they are very different sizes.  One is twice as big as the other.

Picture by Robby-T.