Photo Credit: smudie

I just read a transcription of a brilliant speech given at this year’s Web 2.0 conference by Clay Shirkyon, author of Here Comes Everybody. He speaks of our societal ”cognitive surplus,” the mental time freed up as we’ve moved from physically taxing work and long hours to a more balanced, cognitive work and lifestyle. When the industrial revolution took hold in the early 1900s, people dealt with the new urban life by drinking. (Skirkyon calls it a collective bender.) In the 1960s, people dealt with the new suburban life by drowning in TV sitcoms. Shirkyon’s hope is that we can wake up from this TV stupor and spend our time in a more interactive, participatory way. For his mind the arena for this is social media.

When a TV producer asks him, “How do people find the time?” after talking about Wikipedia collaboration, Skirkyon gets feisty. He calculates:

All of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. 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.

But Skirkyon really caught my attention when he described how children’s television is more highly evolved than adults’ because it’s participatory:

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. 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.

This morning I watched my five-year-old in front of the TV doing cat’s pose, as Jo-Jo did yoga with a lion. Even though I have my own yoga practice, I can’t say I felt at all drawn to getting down on the floor. But that’s just my Gilligan’s Island-trained brain, which learned long ago that TV is not for interacting, TV is for distracting. Food for thought.