Clay Shirky, in Edge and at Demos talk about our surplus, unused brainpower, and what we might be able to do with it if we turn off our TVs.
"How big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia...the whole project -- every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in -- that represents something like the cumulation of 98 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."
Prima facie, this is chastening and if it makes us think harder about when/when not to veg out in front of the box, that can only be good. However, on another level, Shirky's argument seems much less convincing, as it fails to take into account how people really "feel" day-to-day. Often, when we slump down in front of the TV with a glass of wine (or other anaesthetic), we do so as a deliberate choice, as a response to tiredness and/or stress: switching off our brains for a while can feel like a well-earned gift to ourselves. Also, of course, so many of us now spend so much of our working days in front of computer screens that passive consumption can often feel like a better bet than conscious creation when our eyes are already glazed over.
More fundamentally still, where is the evidence that all this online creation is really adding value in the offline world? Yes, there are many inspirational examples of social entrepreneurship out there and Halcyon will unashamedly adopt and adapt the best available but, increasingly, so many blog entries and links and twitters and feeds betray little imagination, social or otherwise, and just feel like - to put it politely - narcissistic noise pollution.