Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Now this is one of those articles that actually seems to have put its finger on something quite important. It starts with the observation about the industrial revolution and gin consumption thus: "The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London. And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset."
Then it moves to a really intriguing speculation about the 20th century equivalent.

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

So what?

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

And where that takes us ...

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.

Yes! That's the point, interactivity mediated electronically. That's the thing we need to pay attention to in terms of the mentality that is formed by it.
And for the Christian faith? The end (we knew it already, really) of monological discourse -was it ever really there in scripture or are we waking from a book-induced trance? We return to dialogue, interaction and personal contact but with the enhancement of multi-media...

WorldChanging: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus: