<story><title>Gin, Television, and Social Surplus</title><url>http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>phaedrus</author><text>We should remember that not all time is interchangeable; just because you&apos;re up to spending 4 hours zonked out watching TV in bed does not mean you are up for spending 4 hours doing useful cognitive work.  Maybe you&apos;re tired, hung over, sick, not feeling it, etc.  However, even given this caveat, the author&apos;s point still stands.  Because even if 4 hours of TV watching only translates to 1 hour of useful creative work and 3 hours of blah, that&apos;s still a huge amount of cognitive surplus.&lt;p&gt;But I think that it is like exercise - just because you watch TV for 4 hours, doesn&apos;t mean you could have jogged or rode a bike for 4 hours straight instead; your body isn&apos;t up to it.  Why isn&apos;t it up to it?  Because you&apos;re used to watching TV.  So even if we only get a very poor 4:1 conversion rate at first, as we exercise our minds or bodies at doing other things besides TV, as a society we&apos;ll improve that exchange rate.</text></comment>
<story><title>Gin, Television, and Social Surplus</title><url>http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pauljonas</author><text>&amp;#62;So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, &quot;Okay, we&apos;re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.&quot; That wasn&apos;t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, &quot;Where do people find the time?&quot; That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, &quot;No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you&apos;ve been masking for 50 years.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Odd, I had a moment like this about a year ago or so…&lt;p&gt;I had just recently revamped an organizational website and made it more interactive, more user-participatory, and had made a remark to an office assistant on how great it was that new &quot;editors&quot; were jumping in and adding all this content, citing one in particular. Her response was the same as the TV person Shirky described - &quot;it must be nice to have all that free time&quot;…&lt;p&gt;Irony being that unlike me (that I rarely watch TV and basically live on the net, work time and a good bit of off time too…), most of these folks can rattle about endlessly all the TV programs they watch and how much they love their DVR…</text></comment>