Day 13

Since the Second World War, increases in GDP, educational attainment, and life span have forced the industrialized world to grapple with something we’d never had to deal with on a national scale: free time. The amount of unstructured time cumulatively available to the educated population ballooned, both because the educated population itself ballooned, and because that population was living longer while working less. (Segments of the population experienced an upsurge of education and free time before the 1940s, but they tended to be in urban enclaves, and the Great Depression reversed many of the existing trends for both schooling and time off from work.) This change was accompanied by a weakening of traditional uses of that free time as a result of suburbanization—moving out of cities and living far from neighbors—and of periodic relocation as people moved for jobs. The cumulative free time in the postwar United States began to add up to billions of collective hours per year, even as picnics and bowling leagues faded into the past. So what did we do with all that time? Mostly, we watched TV.
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This isn’t just an American phenomenon. Since the 1950s, any country with rising GDP has invariably seen a reordering of human affairs; in the whole of the developed world, the three most common activities are now work, sleep, and watching TV. All this is despite considerable evidence that watching that much television is an actual source of unhappiness. In an evocatively titled 2007 study from the Journal of Economic Psychology—“Does Watching TV Make Us Happy?”—the behavioral economists Bruno Frey, Christine Benesch, and Alois Stutzer conclude that not only do unhappy people watch considerably more TV than happy people, but TV watching also pushes aside other activities that are less immediately engaging but can produce longer-term satisfaction. Spending many hours watching TV, on the other hand, is linked to higher material aspirations and to raised anxiety.

The thought that watching all that TV may not be good for us has hardly been unspoken. For the last half century, media critics have been wringing their hands until their palms chafed over the effects of television on society, from Newton Minow’s famous description of TV as a “vast wasteland” to epithets like “idiot box” and “boob tube” to Roald Dahl’s wicked characterization of the television-obsessed Mike Teavee in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Despite their vitriol, these complaints have been utterly ineffective—in every year of the last fifty, television watching per capita has grown. We’ve known about the effects of TV on happiness, first anecdotally and later through psychological research, for decades, but that hasn’t curtailed its growth as the dominant use of our free time.
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Imagine treating the free time of the world’s educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus. How big would that surplus be? To figure it out, we need a unit of measurement, so let’s start with Wikipedia. Suppose we consider the total amount of time people have spent on it as a kind of unit—every edit made to every article, and every argument about those edits, for every language that Wikipedia exists in. That would represent something like one hundred million hours of human thought, back when I was talking to the TV producer. (Martin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher who has spent time studying Wikipedia, helped me arrive at that figure. It’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude.) One hundred million hours of cumulative thought is obviously a lot. How much is it, though, compared to the amount of time we spend watching television?

Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year. That represents about two thousand Wikipedias’ projects’ worth of free time annually. Even tiny subsets of this time are enormous: we spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials. This is a pretty big surplus. People who ask “Where do they find the time?” about those who work on Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, relative to the aggregate free time we all possess. One thing that makes the current age remarkable is that we can now treat free time as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally created projects, rather than as a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person at a time.

~~ Cognitive Surplus -by- Clay Shirky