Why the Internet is Better Than Television

I was surfin' the tubes this afternoon and found a short, insightful piece by longtime internet activist Professor Clay Shirky. He wrote the article in response to an interviewer he spoke with earlier. Upon his explanation of the remarkable social and informational media we've created through Wikipedia she said, "Where [does everyone] find the time?" The article is about how people are starting to leave the television behind in exchange for more interactive forms of entertainment. People of today WANT to be entertained, but they're no longer satisfied with mindless absorbsions like Giligan's Island.

"So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."


At least they're doing something.


Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.


And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change."


You can read the whole thing here, and frankly I found it really interesting and insightful.

I'm really tired people using the media to criticize us as a do-nothing generation of idiots. First of all, no generation is without its healthy number of morons and I won't be made accountable for them. But just because you're too ignorant to recognize what we do as something meaningful, that doesn't give you the right to stand on rooftops screaming at the top of your lungs to publicly denounce it. Not when past generations are just as (if not even moreso) guilty of wasteful recreations like boob-tube watching.

I've always considered myself a person who appreciates that no one generation of humans is fundamentally different from the next. I don't stand for the adolescent "You just don't GET me!!" argument. But I have arrived at the place where I am willing to accept that technology is going to shape humans in a new way, IS shaping us in a new way. It's something that hasn't been available to us before and it's something which we're adapting to, some more quickly than others.

If you don't get it yet, just close your mouth and watch. Don't condemn what you don't yet understand. Because if you let us show you what we're talking about maybe you'll see what an amazing world you can be a part of.