This weekend, Sarah and I tucked into the first season of the AMC series Mad Men. The concept of the show is in essence a look at the lives of Madison Avenue advertising executives, their office staff, and their families. Oh, and their mistresses. Infidelity is the fuel that ran Madison Avenue, apparently. The show begins in 1960—one the background plots is the election of Kennedy vs. Nixon and the focal agency has to work for Nixon (without being paid). In the first episode, the audience witnesses enough social injustice in the form of sexism and racism to erase all idealistic notions of the time period. It almost crosses the line into parody territory, and perhaps for some it will. I found myself rolling my eyes by the end of the first episode. As the season goes on, they tone this down a little bit (while cranking up the existentialism).
Much of the show’s appeal is the self-righteous indignation I feel when I see African Americans being treated like 3rd class citizens, children being slapped around by the neighbors, or women being commanded by their husbands like servants. I suspect self-righteous indignation for the liberal may be in short supply with our side taking over things for a few years. I recommend picking up the DVD to everyone looking to keep the flames indignation burning so as to not realize that your anger is all that makes you feel alive and fill the hole inside your soul! It’s working great for me so far.
Beneath the obvious “oh my god, they were SO primitive and evil” aspect of the show, I sympathize with the existential dread that much of the cast feels. No one is happy, despite having it all and living the American Dream. The central thesis of this show at least early on is that the American Dream is hollow and meaningless and has nothing to do with our true happiness.
I didn’t really have any interest in the show until I saw it parodied on Saturday Night Live in some of the better sketches they’ve done in the past few years. Despite never having seen the show, and even through the layer of parody, I was intrigued by the premise of the show. For me, it’s the best thing to come out of Saturday Night Live in years.
Continuing on the thoughts of yesterday’s post, I’ve recently read Clay Shirky’s speech, “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” You can read a transcript of it, or watch a video. I highly recommend checking out one or the other and coming back here. I’ll wait. For the lazy, here’’s a choice bit that explains much of it:
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. 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.
…
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
Pretty cool, huh? I think Clay is describing the underlying force behind the New York Times article from yesterday. The cognitive surplus is leading to many people using the time formerly soaked up by the one-way media to create things themselves, and to share them. Which causes a glut in the choices for actually consuming, and results in the paradox of choice. Making things collaboratively like Wikipedia makes us happy, but having all those other options makes us unhappy. Another paradox, of sorts.
Wikipedia is a bit of a different from, say, writing fan fiction, because Wikipedia has a core usefulness that is more broad in appeal. You could say that Wikipedia provides a clear benefit to society, whereas the benefit to society of more fiction, or more music, or more photography is less readily apparent. I’m not saying that your X-Files/Evil Dead crossover fanfic doesn’t provide a benefit. I just think it’s harder to make the case for it. I’m not going to do it for you, anyway.
The real mind blower here for me is this idea of thinking about the cognitive surplus–not thinking about it as leisure time, but thinking about it as hours spent thinking. That surplus has always existed, but something about the Internet has provided an entirely new means of tapping into it. Sure, some have chosen to express their surplus by launching flame wars over which Doctor was the best (clearly the 7th), but I think Shirky is right in pointing out that this is all embryonic still. We’re going to see some amazing things soon. What forms will they take? My thinking along these lines before was limited to the idea of crowdsourcing, but I’m starting to see that it’s so much more than that. I really need to read Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.
What problems can we solve using the internet and our cognitive surplus?
Hi! My name is Jeremiah Tolbert, but call me Jeremy. I am a writer, photographer, and web designer currently living in Northern Colorado, seeking either freelance web design work or fulltime employment. Drop me a line if you have any questions, comments, advice, or heckles. I love hearing from new people. If you’re inclined, you can follow me on Twitter, where I share various links and talk about the same things I talk about here, only with fewer characters.
The structure and nature of short stories haven’t really changed in the digital age, as far as I can tell. They’re still told the same way mostly, same perspectives, in roughly the same amount of time ( around 3-7000 words). E-zines are for the most part straight forward adaptations of the print magazine format, to [...]
Since I started getting serious about photography, I have followed a relatively predictable pattern. As soon as there has been snow on the ground, I have quit shooting for the year. I hate snow, I hate the cold, and I have never found winter to be an inspiring time for any of [...]
As a designer, I’m always stumbling across useful resources and tools online, but for whatever reason, I find fewer tools that really exist to help make writers’ lives easier. That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. It just means you have to dig a little deeper. Today, I thought I would share some tools that [...]
At least in the science fiction community, there’s a lot of false community wisdom floating around about the editorial process. Some of them may have been true once. Some were probably invented to mess with the heads of noobs. Some of them are carefully nutured lies, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Well, no [...]
That seems like an unusual idea, doesn’t it? That wielding a camera to capture single moments in time really has anything valuable to add to the process of writing stories? But it has, I think. Each time I pick up the camera, I think about writing, and each time I write, I think about [...]
Pretty cool, huh? I think Clay is describing the underlying force behind 
