http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Tarina/~3/306690922/
The industrial revolution brought people the ability to manage something they had for the first time: free time. Rather than finding ways to use it productively, people found ways to sink themselves in an intellectual stupor, where the TV acted as a cognitive heat-sink.Incredible 15 minutes by Clay Shirky on where our time is wasted and where it can be regenerated: TV.
To rephrase Clay Shirky, people in media are the last ones to ask the question, where people find the time to contribute to projects like Wikipedia. No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus media has been masking for 50 years.
In US alone, people watch television around 200 billion hours. That accounts for 2000 Wikipedia projects.
I haven’t watched TV for 2 years. What a feeling to wake up from dormancy.
In Finland, we have something called the TV permit. It is a permission to consume what you see on public television for a relatively high fee.
With recent development in Finland where people are increasingly fleeing from the duty to pay the permit, the solution is not more content, but more interaction. I was thinking, if this permission to consume could be turned around to a permission to produce. A citizen would get their own TV channel (videocasts, mobile blogs), their own radio channel (podcasts), their own news paper (blogs) and means to tap into the collective action of untapped productive potential of millions of fins and billions of citizens of the spaceship earth (social networking) for a small fee. That’s the direction where nationally funded media should head. I don’t know if there is anyone listening.
I make this statement in an interview with Olli-Pekka Heinonen, who is a director at Finnish National Broadcasting Company. He listens, but I have to say that the gears are turning slowly:
Keywords: technology