How gin and sitcoms shape society

May 7, 2008

If you have any interest in how society’s creative energy is shaped, contained and funnelled and what the implications may be in the near future, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirkey at Here Comes Everybody is definitely worth a read.

To my mind, the gins and sitcoms of the world act as champagne corks – they keep everything bottled up, building pressure (Shirkey’s cognitive surplus) until they are thrown off and there’s a release and a flurry of activity. Then, before too long, the cork gets put back in the bottle for the pressure to build again. Just as Shirkey says that gin stifled the creative actions at the start of the Industrial age in the article, television and other one-way media has been stifling creative energies in recent decades. It is becoming clear that the outpouring of creativity in our information age, the release of the cork, is two-way and user-created media: blogs, podcasts, YouTube and Facebook, just to name a few.

More and more, people are looking at television, looking at radio, looking at news reports and, in Shirkey’s words, ‘looking for the mouse’. They want to feedback, to reply, to create and challenge. That’s why I’m excited about the future – I want to hear what these people have to say when they get off the couch and do something.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks
thanks to @owenhodda for the link

Update: Here’s a video of the presentation the original post was derived from. Well worth spending a few minutes watching.

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