High School. I can confidently say that those two words simultaneously bring about feelings of both love and hate. I have never loved hating something in my entire life, but then again, who doesn’t love to hate high school? There’s so much to say about this place I once referred to as ‘hell,’ but as a more mature version of myself, I can honestly say I am grateful for the experience, which in turn helped me grow out of my prepubescent ‘know-it-all’ stage.
It was here that I had many of my “firsts.” The first time I tried alcohol. The first time I developed a real crush. The first time I got a C on a paper. The first time I rebelled against my parents. And the first time I obsessed about a television show.
Around the time I entered High School as a measly freshman, The O.C. had quickly become the highest rated show on television, peaking with 9.7 million viewers. The show skyrocketed into stardom within months of the shows airing in 2003, generating a loyal following of groupies, due in large part because of its references to pop culture. In short, the show was relatable. This is not to say that producers didn’t take the plot too far, but in terms of music, film and even comic books, there was something every highschooler could connect with. Fridays at school were designated for OC discussions about the episode that aired the night before. My friends and I would sit around the lunch table discussing Marissa’s latest drug overdose, or Seth and Summer’s first kiss, even Ryan’s brooding personality.
I’ll openly admit, I spent a lot of my free time in High School watching the show, not to mention I watched a whole lot of reruns. But in the book Cognitive Surplus, author Clay Shirky points out that as Americans, it is our duty to spend our free time watching television. I stupidly chose to watch The O.C. but that’s beside the point.
“TV quickly took up the largest chunk of our free time: an average of over twenty hours a week, worldwide. In the history of media, only radio has been as omnipresent, and much radio listening accompanies other activities, like work or travel. For most people of the time, watching TV is the activity.”
As a result of the emphasis placed on television, we have morphed into a visually dominated and isolated society. A majority of the population consciously spends the largest chunk of time consuming this visual stimulus, resulting in a decline in social interaction. We spend less quality time with family and friends, and thus stress the importance of material satisfaction. Shirky takes this further and describes the effects as “under-investing in relational activities.”
Shirky shifts our attention to help us evaluate how we allocate our free time. For example, take Wikipedia as an entire unit, where a unit is equivalent to the totally amount of time spent using the site. According to Shirky, Wikipedia therefore represents about one hundred million hours of thought. This immediately seems like an insane amount of time to have spent in one place. However, he compares that amount of thought time to the thought time allocated to watching television. We watch about two hundred billion hours of TV each year. According to Shirky, this excess time is considered a surplus. This enormous amount of free time devoted to TV watching is a surplus that we as humans don’t know what to do with. Yet, as technology changes, our allocation of time has evolved as well.
“But now for the first time in the history of television, some cohorts of young people are watching TV less than their elders. Several population studies – of high school students, broadband users, YouTube users – have noticed the change, and their basic observation is always the same: young populations with access to fast, interactive media are shifting their behavior away from media that presupposes pure consumption.”
Today, people would rather spend their free time interactively online, where commenting, sharing, outsourcing, rating, and discussing are all available. According to Shirky, it is our human nature to share and collaborate ideas, stories, and information. We have instincts to be heard, to tell a story even if no ones listening. It is from this idea, that Websites such as Wikipedia were successful.
I will definitely admit to allocating my time differently now than I did in high school. Thank god I don’t spend my Thursday nights watching The O.C. live (or better yet thank god that show is not on television anymore). Nowadays, I usually watch the TV shows I like online, giving me the ability to participate interactively if I choose. Clay Shirky describes this as architecture of participation.
Wikipedia is based on this idea of architectures of participation, where consumers have the ability to edit any page at any moment in time. This user-generated index is free, and thus can be accessed by anyone. Wikipedia encourages sharing and teamwork, and ultimately the site promotes a collaborative tomorrow. Other sites built interactively, make it possible for us to collectively make a difference and create/develop ideas together. Shirky thinks, and Ill end with this just as he did…
“The world’s people, and the connections among us, provide the raw material for cognitive surplus. The technology will continue to improve, and the population will continue to grow, but change in the direction of more participation has already happened. What matters most now is our imaginations. The opportunity before us, individually and collectively, is enormous; what we do with it will be determined largely by how well we are able to imagine and reward public creativity, participation, and sharing.”
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