lesson #7 adventure

Whew! Found time to do the adventure, and I'm glad that I did!

Clay Shirky makes some excellent points about the shift of what he calls "cognitive surplus." I couldn't agree more with many of his points, and I believe that the shift is overall a healthy one for society as a whole. Sure, we're still going to veg, but if we can have just as much fun or more creating something, all the better for us! (Did you know that your metabolism is slower when you watch T.V. than when you sleep because of mental inactivity? At least zoning out/into a game will make you a little more active.)

Of course, it's not as if someone can't veg on the Internet. It's amazing how much time can be wasted just clicking between updates. This is probably not very different than watching T.V.; it is still passive.

Alternatively, there's a good chance that the ease of Internet communication may cause more work for people who would otherwise be relaxing, which I don't view as necessarily a good thing. Shirky says that people have free time and that we don't know what else to do with our cognitive energy except sink it into numbness. He says that gin was what people did with their free time when they moved from agricultural to industrial living. The thing is, I'm not sure that people have actually had more or much more free time. In agricultural living, you may have to work every day, but there are certain times of the day or of the year where the amount of work that needs to be done wanes (in winter, for example).

I didn't have a lot of free time before, and thus did not watch a lot of T.V. The reason I use the Internet more now is because of the information and networks available, and because it's often easier to communicate casually with someone over the 'Net than it is to physically meet with them. For myself, and I suspect many other people, I think the reason for using the Internet is its convenience more than any supposed free time we might have.