9 ms·

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (2008)

165 points by rzk 3y ago

ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
And now we have Social Media. I doubt there will ever be a time in human history where the masses aren't spending their time doing _something_. As long as there is money to be made.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  bread and circuses (ca.100): http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/juvenal/10.shtml#:~:text=se%0Acontinet,panem%20et%20circenses http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/juvenal/10.shtml#:~:text=se%0...
082349872349872 3y ago
More discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus (here we are, 14 years later than the book; are there any obvious examples of freed cognitive surplus changing the world in the interim?)
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  The cognitive surplus has been captured by social media "influencers" and big corporations providing the platforms. The relevant read for the 2020s is "Technofeudalism" by Yanis Varoufakis.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    Thanks, I'll have to read that. Fortunately that capture is mostly voluntary: nothing but loss of mod-cons prevents anyone from descending from the platforms* of the eloi and seeking the caverns of the morlocks. Then awa tae the hill to the lee and the rocks Ere I own a usurper I'll crouch with the fox * each of which is filled with screenshots of the other 5?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > freed cognitive surplus changing the world I think it's freed economic surplus that does this. If you have enough money to buy an electric car, you fund future electric car development. If you have enough money to buy a ticket on a rocket ship, you fund future rocket ship development. The problem with cognitive surplus is it needs something to aim at. If there's nothing new being invented or pursued, it reverts to attention: better marketing, nicer recruitment, etc etc, that just increase competitiveness within an established field. That's all nice, but it doesn't unlock progress that would obsolete human effort or polluting methods, or anything technoutopian like that.
- rapnie 3y ago
  My (entirely anecdotal) observation is that while digital tools may have freed cognitive surplus, the continuous information bombardment and distractions of the attention economy does not work to align motivations to join collaborative efforts. The cognitive surplus is used to tailor ones own preferences for what to work on, and people fragment rather than unite. "Your initiative is nice, but not for me as I am aware of so many choices I would make differently".
  - jhoechtl 3y ago
    There seems to be a mechanism built into humans that they do not make use of that cognitive surplus. In the sense that they are unable to collectively build a tower up into the sky (Tower of Babel). But this also varies from societys and the things they value. From hear-say collective thinking is ubiquituous in the Chinese society with Chinese people shaking their heads in disbelieve when we talk about individualism. It's also worth noting that individualism was the credo of last 30? years of education in the western hemisphere.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jasode 3y ago
  >; are there any obvious examples of freed cognitive surplus changing the world in the interim? I think Wikipedia is an obvious example. The vast majority of its content and edits comes from enthusiastic amateurs who have other fulltime jobs unrelated to writing encyclopedias. A bunch of humans' "surplus free time" continuously adds/improves Wikipedia. (E.g. even the most prolific Wikipedia editor has a day job at US Customs & Border Protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pruitt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pruitt) Another example that's underappreciated is the massive amount of amateur Youtube videos spreading knowledge (especially the DIY tutorials, building projects, repairing cars/homes/appliances, testing products, etc). I compare that social dissemination phenomenon to the famous "monkeys learning from other monkeys on how to wash potatos" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect Most of those Youtube videos are also created by people who have fulltime jobs so they expend their cognitive surplus recording content that can be valuable. This HN website of user comments and and Stack Overflow answers are also the product of cognitive surplus enabled by the so-called read+write Web 2.0. The early Linux development in 1990s could be argued as cognitive surplus because it was a collaboration of unpaid volunteer effort. That may have changed because I think I saw statistics saying most contributions now come from paid employees of corporations. Linux is just a major example but you could argue than any popular open source project that's mostly unpaid volunteers has the potential to change the world. E.g. OpenStreetMap.
  - Gravityloss 3y ago
    I still think the biggest bottleneck is curation. Searching for videos gives me a lot of spam. Same on so many platforms. The constant technological warfare between spammers and indexers, and it looks like currently spammers and trolls are a bit ahead the historical average on most platforms? That's one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so good, because they curate very strictly (many say overly strictly). Also Hacker News curates discussion quite heavily to make it very much better than most other forums. That is very laborious and involves both peer review and central review and all kinds of algorithms and software tooling. There are some new innovations like X community notes that have come out of research work. I have participated in forums since the BBS era and can see a lot of repeating negative patterns that basically all discussion platforms just trip on, over and over. Whoever creates a service with a comments section should be aware...
- gumby 3y ago
  This is an apolitical comment! If you reply please avoid the political aspects! I’ve been thinking of the MAGA movement using this framework (though I hadn’t seen this great little essay before). A lot of its adherents are older people who have retired and have a lot of free time. Many of them grew up in an age of going to concerts and other mass events, (though I don’t think Woodstock actually changed the world). Many of the events can be “joined” in a slightly less passive way than merely watching TV, but are similar in that a set of professionals produce it and then you basically attend or watch. Also it is participatory, and is not just older people, so people can jump in and use the same sense of spectacle to be seen as well. Q is a good example, but there are many. Another is the anti vaxer movement which arose at a time when people were not financially desperate but had a lot of free time. Regardless of what you think of these phenomena, one cannot deny that they have “changed the world in the interim”. I used to be an unalloyed fan (and was trying to work towards) of a future of universal unemployment: a utopian future where robots do all the work, the marginal cost of manufacturing is nil, and humans just do what they like: write bad poetry, hang out, etc. I never anticipated that such a Star Trek world free of wants would still have political movements.
  - thechao 3y ago
    I've been slowly weening myself off of ... internet (damn you, HN!); but I saw a phrase on my wife's FB feed: don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1%. I think this summarizes my feeling towards social media, entirely. I think it helps to explain why a lot of people can be simultaneously very well off (compared to, say, the USA in 1990), yet completely dissatisfied with their lives.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      > don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1% Also, don't think that the 1% of your "friends" are the 99%. I remember seeing a post a while ago that pointed out that, mathematically, the average person on Facebook has far fewer friends than their friends have. While that seems paradoxical (maybe even impossible), the reason for this is that, if you think of "number of friends" as a bell curve, people with tons of friends on the right side of the curve, by definition, show up as friends of many more people than folks further to the left of the curve. If you're one of these "other people", you might think "Gosh, my have friends on average have many more friends than I have, I must be a loser", when in reality you could be just in the middle of the bell curve (or even substantially to the right of the bell curve) in terms of number of friends. That is, the average person (or, again, even significantly above average) is basically comparing themselves to all of these "superconnectors". Of course, that happens in lots of other places in social media (the only videos on TikTok etc. that get up voted are the guy that speaks 32 languages or the mogul skier that can do a triple back flip...), I really like the "on average you have fewer friends than your friends" example because it is a simple yet very unintuitive consequence of graph math.
badgersnake 3y ago
The way things are going we should go back to the gin. Although the modern stuff is way nicer (and safer) than what they used to drink in the London Gin Palaces back in the day.
- defrost 3y ago
  Bleeding edge still image early influencer Billy Hogarth suggested craft beer was (is) better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane
  - badgersnake 3y ago
    It must have been. He’s still a bit of a local celebrity out in Chiswick, you can visit his house. I did a gin tasting at the Portobello distillery and they give you an approximation of the historic gin palace gin. It’s not something you want to drink twice.
    - Earw0rm 3y ago
      Curiously, it's literally across the road from the Fullers Griffin brewery. Which, while not exactly craft beer, was perhaps the nearest approximation to what we now call craft that you'd be likely to encounter in late 20th century London.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  I’m more of a whiskey guy, but cheers all the same!
taopai 3y ago
Could someone recommend me good and interesting books about how social media changed/s people. Socially and psychologically. I just read Stolen Focus 2022, a book that talks about the downside of social media. But I got a little bit disenchanted with the second half. Is Cognitive Surplus a good book? What else comes in your mind? Thank you.
- criddell 3y ago
  While this doesn't directly match what you are looking for, you might be interested in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death from 1985. From Wikipedia: > In Amusing, Postman argued that by expressing ideas through visual imagery, television reduces politics, news, history and other serious topics to entertainment. He worried that culture would decline if the people became an audience and their public business a "vaudeville act". He also argued that television is destroying the "serious and rational public conversation" that was sustained for centuries by the printing press. Rather than the restricted information in George Orwell's 1984, he claimed the flow of distraction we experience is akin to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
  - taopai 3y ago
    This is the kind of book I was looking for! Thank you! Books are really changing my life, and the best suggestions come from this website! Great books are amazing, it's sad now people focuses on pics and funny videos. I hope my friends read more.
- yamrzou 3y ago
  - The Shallows - Amusing Ourselves to Death - Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
  - taopai 3y ago
    Thank you. Wow, Reader, Come Home sounds very interesting! Now I am reading Reading in the Brain, a book that talks about how brain processes reading. Your suggestion it's a great match to follow it. I really like this topic! Thank!
triceratops 3y ago
With the shift from blue collar to white collar employment in the developed world, I wonder if there hasn't been an overall decline in cognitive surplus in the past 50 years. After 8 hours of coding, meetings, and emails, I am done. I'm up for physical activity. But no way am I contributing to open source or doing anything cognitively challenging.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  When I got my first job, my older parents and extended family members laughed (in a friendly way) that these new tech companies were letting me work “bankers’ hours”. One older relative had serious concerns for my job because I said my boss liked to arrive at 7:30AM every day but I didn’t show up until 9. That was unthinkable to them. When they grew into the corporate world you were expected to be there before your boss and stay until after your boss left, finishing any last minute work before the next morning. Weekend work and long travel days were common. Going back even further, I heard stories and saw photos about my ancestors struggling to secure enough food to eat every year. Black and white photos of what was left of their dirt-floored houses. Every day was work and worry about securing basics for survival of the family farm. So if your job is a clean 8 hours of desk work with some meetings and e-mails mixed in, I’d say it’s actually less demanding than what was expected years ago.
  - triceratops 3y ago
    The proportion of people who work corporate jobs vs the assembly line has surely changed though. The latter work their hours, go home and forget about work until next morning. The percentage of single-earner households was also higher back then. Having a wife who handled the domestic front lessened the load on the people working demanding corporate jobs. Nowadays it's common for both of the couple to have that type of job. And like, with all due respect, there were also a lot of mentally undemanding desk jobs back then. People got hired into them with just high school degrees. There are no "paper-pushers" anymore because there is no paper. Subsistence farmers have never been prolific producers of art or literature. That kind of proves my point.
HansardExpert 3y ago
I enjoyed that. --snip-- She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years." --snip-- That made me laugh.
- Damogran6 3y ago
  Honestly, it kind of warped my brain. Every fall my anxiety would peak until I found whatever project I had to keep entertained during the winter months.
jhoechtl 3y ago
Unfortunatelly it goes on. After the sitcomes came social media and cats.
SliceOfWaifu 3y ago
"...they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing." That explains the shift in younger audiences from Facebook/YouTube to Twitter/TikTok.
- bertil 3y ago
  That audience is now 19 and believes that “chat” is a standard second-person plural pronoun that points at people meant to be active, available to answer questions, and knowledgeable about anything Google knows or doesn’t.
janfoeh 3y ago
Does anyone know whether he's still writing anywhere these days? I very much enjoyed reading his blog back in the day, as well as his book. I would be interested in reading his takes on more current matters.
Animats 3y ago
"All we ask is 5 hours a day" - ABC-TV promotional poster to the industry, hung from lampposts in Hollywood, 2002.
zoogeny 3y ago
I have heard the story about gin carts and the analysis about how gin was used to quell social disquiet at the beginning of the industrial revolution and the urbanization of the English public. Even if that is historically accurate, it seems a long jump to move from there to the eventual institutions like public libraries. Producing require motivation, while consumption is passive. It doesn't seem guaranteed to me that people will be motivated in their free time in the way that will result in Wikipedia. In fact, it seems that leveraging passivity is probably more valuable. For example, the way TikTok gets people to rate videos is a byproduct of passive consumption - it requires no motivation at all. This article also flies in the face of the normal attribution of 90% lurkers, 9% up voters, 1% creators [1]. I don't see any trends moving those numbers in the short term. Even a "sharing" action is in the 9% bucket. So I share the skepticism against this idea. I don't see free time shifting away from passive consumption to content production anytime soon. 1. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  This article is a classic instance of a thought-provoking thesis that is supported by interesting assertions that don't hold up to scrutiny. See Yuval Noah Harari, Malcom Gladwell, Jared Diamond, etc. Every single one has included dilettante-level ideas that make a lot more sense when holding a beer. The thesis is still interesting, and I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
  - jameshart 3y ago
    The purpose of the gin anecdote is less to provide an airtight proof of a scientific correlation, and more as a warmup act to get your mind to think about social behavior in a different way than you might naturally be inclined to. The author getting you to walk through a warmup exercise to get you ready to follow the argument they are about to make. Not every piece of writing is meant to function as an academic thesis.
    - shermantanktop 3y ago
georgeecollins 3y ago
This is interesting but incorrect if the thesis is that suddenly people spent a lot of time from the '50s on watching television (or the sitcom). Before TV people spent a ton of time watching movies. The 1940s was the peak years of movie watching in the US. When you went to a movie in those days you saw two and the numbers that Americans watched was much, much higher than today (or the late 50's), particularly per capita. Then also before the rise of television there was enormously popular radio dramas that probably took up about the same amount of the average American's time as TV in the 30's and the 40's. So if this all represents an explosion of social surplus, I would argue that surplus existed in the US way before TV.
- rcoveson 3y ago
  In terms of hours invested, I don't think going to the movies ever got close to the 50's rate of television consumption. I can find stats as high as 90 million tickets/week, which (if we assume 100% double features) may have been as much as 400 million hours per week. With a US population of 130 million, that's roughly three hours per week per capita. Compare that to television in the 1950s, which nearly reached 5 hours per capita per day. That's over 10x the time investment. Radio, on the other hand, seems like it may have done similar numbers to those of TV. But I'd be interested how different those modes of consumption were in practice. Certainly some people watch TV in the background, and some people listen to the radio while doing nothing else, but I would bet the rate of watching TV while doing nothing else was far higher than that of radio.
dang 3y ago
Related: Gin, television, and social surplus, or, “looking for the mouse” (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29198951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29198951 - Nov 2021 (16 comments) Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174410 - April 2008 (55 comments)
Jun8 3y ago
>> The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. Compare with vodka consumption in Russia, e.g. see this paper for alcohol's astonishing effect on Russian society: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)62247-3/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
- atoav 3y ago
  That sounds true, but as someone who made the same shift, I think it is more likely that the rural people drink themselves into a stupor. The history of human civilization is told through an ever-shifting lense. A lot of the modern problems have always been there, they just weren't seen as problems, there were no names for them or people hid it better. So if I hear such a claim, I need a good citation. Sure there are many reports of the bad situations in early industrialized cities. But how many reports of rural places that starved before had not been written because there was no one there to witness it? Cities did surely create their own breed of problems, there is no denying that, but cities also increased the visibility on problems that had existed elswhere as well.

165 points by rzk 3y ago

And now we have Social Media. I doubt there will ever be a time in human history where the masses aren't spending their time doing _something_. As long as there is money to be made.

082349872349872 3y ago
bread and circuses (ca.100): http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/juvenal/10.shtml#:~:text=se%0Acontinet,panem%20et%20circenses http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/juvenal/10.shtml#:~:text=se%0...

082349872349872 3y ago

More discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus (here we are, 14 years later than the book; are there any obvious examples of freed cognitive surplus changing the world in the interim?)

bluetomcat 3y ago
The cognitive surplus has been captured by social media "influencers" and big corporations providing the platforms. The relevant read for the 2020s is "Technofeudalism" by Yanis Varoufakis.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Thanks, I'll have to read that. Fortunately that capture is mostly voluntary: nothing but loss of mod-cons prevents anyone from descending from the platforms* of the eloi and seeking the caverns of the morlocks. Then awa tae the hill to the lee and the rocks Ere I own a usurper I'll crouch with the fox * each of which is filled with screenshots of the other 5?
robertlagrant 3y ago
> freed cognitive surplus changing the world I think it's freed economic surplus that does this. If you have enough money to buy an electric car, you fund future electric car development. If you have enough money to buy a ticket on a rocket ship, you fund future rocket ship development. The problem with cognitive surplus is it needs something to aim at. If there's nothing new being invented or pursued, it reverts to attention: better marketing, nicer recruitment, etc etc, that just increase competitiveness within an established field. That's all nice, but it doesn't unlock progress that would obsolete human effort or polluting methods, or anything technoutopian like that.
rapnie 3y ago
My (entirely anecdotal) observation is that while digital tools may have freed cognitive surplus, the continuous information bombardment and distractions of the attention economy does not work to align motivations to join collaborative efforts. The cognitive surplus is used to tailor ones own preferences for what to work on, and people fragment rather than unite. "Your initiative is nice, but not for me as I am aware of so many choices I would make differently".
- jhoechtl 3y ago
  There seems to be a mechanism built into humans that they do not make use of that cognitive surplus. In the sense that they are unable to collectively build a tower up into the sky (Tower of Babel). But this also varies from societys and the things they value. From hear-say collective thinking is ubiquituous in the Chinese society with Chinese people shaking their heads in disbelieve when we talk about individualism. It's also worth noting that individualism was the credo of last 30? years of education in the western hemisphere.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jasode 3y ago
>; are there any obvious examples of freed cognitive surplus changing the world in the interim? I think Wikipedia is an obvious example. The vast majority of its content and edits comes from enthusiastic amateurs who have other fulltime jobs unrelated to writing encyclopedias. A bunch of humans' "surplus free time" continuously adds/improves Wikipedia. (E.g. even the most prolific Wikipedia editor has a day job at US Customs & Border Protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pruitt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pruitt) Another example that's underappreciated is the massive amount of amateur Youtube videos spreading knowledge (especially the DIY tutorials, building projects, repairing cars/homes/appliances, testing products, etc). I compare that social dissemination phenomenon to the famous "monkeys learning from other monkeys on how to wash potatos" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect Most of those Youtube videos are also created by people who have fulltime jobs so they expend their cognitive surplus recording content that can be valuable. This HN website of user comments and and Stack Overflow answers are also the product of cognitive surplus enabled by the so-called read+write Web 2.0. The early Linux development in 1990s could be argued as cognitive surplus because it was a collaboration of unpaid volunteer effort. That may have changed because I think I saw statistics saying most contributions now come from paid employees of corporations. Linux is just a major example but you could argue than any popular open source project that's mostly unpaid volunteers has the potential to change the world. E.g. OpenStreetMap.
- Gravityloss 3y ago
  I still think the biggest bottleneck is curation. Searching for videos gives me a lot of spam. Same on so many platforms. The constant technological warfare between spammers and indexers, and it looks like currently spammers and trolls are a bit ahead the historical average on most platforms? That's one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so good, because they curate very strictly (many say overly strictly). Also Hacker News curates discussion quite heavily to make it very much better than most other forums. That is very laborious and involves both peer review and central review and all kinds of algorithms and software tooling. There are some new innovations like X community notes that have come out of research work. I have participated in forums since the BBS era and can see a lot of repeating negative patterns that basically all discussion platforms just trip on, over and over. Whoever creates a service with a comments section should be aware...
gumby 3y ago
This is an apolitical comment! If you reply please avoid the political aspects! I’ve been thinking of the MAGA movement using this framework (though I hadn’t seen this great little essay before). A lot of its adherents are older people who have retired and have a lot of free time. Many of them grew up in an age of going to concerts and other mass events, (though I don’t think Woodstock actually changed the world). Many of the events can be “joined” in a slightly less passive way than merely watching TV, but are similar in that a set of professionals produce it and then you basically attend or watch. Also it is participatory, and is not just older people, so people can jump in and use the same sense of spectacle to be seen as well. Q is a good example, but there are many. Another is the anti vaxer movement which arose at a time when people were not financially desperate but had a lot of free time. Regardless of what you think of these phenomena, one cannot deny that they have “changed the world in the interim”. I used to be an unalloyed fan (and was trying to work towards) of a future of universal unemployment: a utopian future where robots do all the work, the marginal cost of manufacturing is nil, and humans just do what they like: write bad poetry, hang out, etc. I never anticipated that such a Star Trek world free of wants would still have political movements.
- thechao 3y ago
  I've been slowly weening myself off of ... internet (damn you, HN!); but I saw a phrase on my wife's FB feed: don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1%. I think this summarizes my feeling towards social media, entirely. I think it helps to explain why a lot of people can be simultaneously very well off (compared to, say, the USA in 1990), yet completely dissatisfied with their lives.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    > don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1% Also, don't think that the 1% of your "friends" are the 99%. I remember seeing a post a while ago that pointed out that, mathematically, the average person on Facebook has far fewer friends than their friends have. While that seems paradoxical (maybe even impossible), the reason for this is that, if you think of "number of friends" as a bell curve, people with tons of friends on the right side of the curve, by definition, show up as friends of many more people than folks further to the left of the curve. If you're one of these "other people", you might think "Gosh, my have friends on average have many more friends than I have, I must be a loser", when in reality you could be just in the middle of the bell curve (or even substantially to the right of the bell curve) in terms of number of friends. That is, the average person (or, again, even significantly above average) is basically comparing themselves to all of these "superconnectors". Of course, that happens in lots of other places in social media (the only videos on TikTok etc. that get up voted are the guy that speaks 32 languages or the mogul skier that can do a triple back flip...), I really like the "on average you have fewer friends than your friends" example because it is a simple yet very unintuitive consequence of graph math.

badgersnake 3y ago

The way things are going we should go back to the gin. Although the modern stuff is way nicer (and safer) than what they used to drink in the London Gin Palaces back in the day.

defrost 3y ago
Bleeding edge still image early influencer Billy Hogarth suggested craft beer was (is) better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane
- badgersnake 3y ago
  It must have been. He’s still a bit of a local celebrity out in Chiswick, you can visit his house. I did a gin tasting at the Portobello distillery and they give you an approximation of the historic gin palace gin. It’s not something you want to drink twice.
  - Earw0rm 3y ago
    Curiously, it's literally across the road from the Fullers Griffin brewery. Which, while not exactly craft beer, was perhaps the nearest approximation to what we now call craft that you'd be likely to encounter in late 20th century London.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dclowd9901 3y ago
I’m more of a whiskey guy, but cheers all the same!

taopai 3y ago

Could someone recommend me good and interesting books about how social media changed/s people. Socially and psychologically. I just read Stolen Focus 2022, a book that talks about the downside of social media. But I got a little bit disenchanted with the second half. Is Cognitive Surplus a good book? What else comes in your mind? Thank you.

criddell 3y ago
While this doesn't directly match what you are looking for, you might be interested in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death from 1985. From Wikipedia: > In Amusing, Postman argued that by expressing ideas through visual imagery, television reduces politics, news, history and other serious topics to entertainment. He worried that culture would decline if the people became an audience and their public business a "vaudeville act". He also argued that television is destroying the "serious and rational public conversation" that was sustained for centuries by the printing press. Rather than the restricted information in George Orwell's 1984, he claimed the flow of distraction we experience is akin to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
- taopai 3y ago
  This is the kind of book I was looking for! Thank you! Books are really changing my life, and the best suggestions come from this website! Great books are amazing, it's sad now people focuses on pics and funny videos. I hope my friends read more.
yamrzou 3y ago
- The Shallows - Amusing Ourselves to Death - Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
- taopai 3y ago
  Thank you. Wow, Reader, Come Home sounds very interesting! Now I am reading Reading in the Brain, a book that talks about how brain processes reading. Your suggestion it's a great match to follow it. I really like this topic! Thank!

triceratops 3y ago

With the shift from blue collar to white collar employment in the developed world, I wonder if there hasn't been an overall decline in cognitive surplus in the past 50 years. After 8 hours of coding, meetings, and emails, I am done. I'm up for physical activity. But no way am I contributing to open source or doing anything cognitively challenging.

Aurornis 3y ago
When I got my first job, my older parents and extended family members laughed (in a friendly way) that these new tech companies were letting me work “bankers’ hours”. One older relative had serious concerns for my job because I said my boss liked to arrive at 7:30AM every day but I didn’t show up until 9. That was unthinkable to them. When they grew into the corporate world you were expected to be there before your boss and stay until after your boss left, finishing any last minute work before the next morning. Weekend work and long travel days were common. Going back even further, I heard stories and saw photos about my ancestors struggling to secure enough food to eat every year. Black and white photos of what was left of their dirt-floored houses. Every day was work and worry about securing basics for survival of the family farm. So if your job is a clean 8 hours of desk work with some meetings and e-mails mixed in, I’d say it’s actually less demanding than what was expected years ago.
- triceratops 3y ago
  The proportion of people who work corporate jobs vs the assembly line has surely changed though. The latter work their hours, go home and forget about work until next morning. The percentage of single-earner households was also higher back then. Having a wife who handled the domestic front lessened the load on the people working demanding corporate jobs. Nowadays it's common for both of the couple to have that type of job. And like, with all due respect, there were also a lot of mentally undemanding desk jobs back then. People got hired into them with just high school degrees. There are no "paper-pushers" anymore because there is no paper. Subsistence farmers have never been prolific producers of art or literature. That kind of proves my point.

HansardExpert 3y ago

I enjoyed that. --snip-- She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years." --snip-- That made me laugh.

Damogran6 3y ago
Honestly, it kind of warped my brain. Every fall my anxiety would peak until I found whatever project I had to keep entertained during the winter months.

jhoechtl 3y ago

Unfortunatelly it goes on. After the sitcomes came social media and cats.

SliceOfWaifu 3y ago

"...they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing." That explains the shift in younger audiences from Facebook/YouTube to Twitter/TikTok.

bertil 3y ago
That audience is now 19 and believes that “chat” is a standard second-person plural pronoun that points at people meant to be active, available to answer questions, and knowledgeable about anything Google knows or doesn’t.

janfoeh 3y ago

Does anyone know whether he's still writing anywhere these days? I very much enjoyed reading his blog back in the day, as well as his book. I would be interested in reading his takes on more current matters.

Animats 3y ago

"All we ask is 5 hours a day" - ABC-TV promotional poster to the industry, hung from lampposts in Hollywood, 2002.

zoogeny 3y ago

I have heard the story about gin carts and the analysis about how gin was used to quell social disquiet at the beginning of the industrial revolution and the urbanization of the English public. Even if that is historically accurate, it seems a long jump to move from there to the eventual institutions like public libraries. Producing require motivation, while consumption is passive. It doesn't seem guaranteed to me that people will be motivated in their free time in the way that will result in Wikipedia. In fact, it seems that leveraging passivity is probably more valuable. For example, the way TikTok gets people to rate videos is a byproduct of passive consumption - it requires no motivation at all. This article also flies in the face of the normal attribution of 90% lurkers, 9% up voters, 1% creators [1]. I don't see any trends moving those numbers in the short term. Even a "sharing" action is in the 9% bucket. So I share the skepticism against this idea. I don't see free time shifting away from passive consumption to content production anytime soon. 1. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/

shermantanktop 3y ago
This article is a classic instance of a thought-provoking thesis that is supported by interesting assertions that don't hold up to scrutiny. See Yuval Noah Harari, Malcom Gladwell, Jared Diamond, etc. Every single one has included dilettante-level ideas that make a lot more sense when holding a beer. The thesis is still interesting, and I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- jameshart 3y ago
  The purpose of the gin anecdote is less to provide an airtight proof of a scientific correlation, and more as a warmup act to get your mind to think about social behavior in a different way than you might naturally be inclined to. The author getting you to walk through a warmup exercise to get you ready to follow the argument they are about to make. Not every piece of writing is meant to function as an academic thesis.
  - shermantanktop 3y ago

georgeecollins 3y ago

This is interesting but incorrect if the thesis is that suddenly people spent a lot of time from the '50s on watching television (or the sitcom). Before TV people spent a ton of time watching movies. The 1940s was the peak years of movie watching in the US. When you went to a movie in those days you saw two and the numbers that Americans watched was much, much higher than today (or the late 50's), particularly per capita. Then also before the rise of television there was enormously popular radio dramas that probably took up about the same amount of the average American's time as TV in the 30's and the 40's. So if this all represents an explosion of social surplus, I would argue that surplus existed in the US way before TV.

rcoveson 3y ago
In terms of hours invested, I don't think going to the movies ever got close to the 50's rate of television consumption. I can find stats as high as 90 million tickets/week, which (if we assume 100% double features) may have been as much as 400 million hours per week. With a US population of 130 million, that's roughly three hours per week per capita. Compare that to television in the 1950s, which nearly reached 5 hours per capita per day. That's over 10x the time investment. Radio, on the other hand, seems like it may have done similar numbers to those of TV. But I'd be interested how different those modes of consumption were in practice. Certainly some people watch TV in the background, and some people listen to the radio while doing nothing else, but I would bet the rate of watching TV while doing nothing else was far higher than that of radio.

dang 3y ago

Related: Gin, television, and social surplus, or, “looking for the mouse” (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29198951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29198951 - Nov 2021 (16 comments) Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174410 - April 2008 (55 comments)

Jun8 3y ago

>> The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. Compare with vodka consumption in Russia, e.g. see this paper for alcohol's astonishing effect on Russian society: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)62247-3/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

atoav 3y ago
That sounds true, but as someone who made the same shift, I think it is more likely that the rural people drink themselves into a stupor. The history of human civilization is told through an ever-shifting lense. A lot of the modern problems have always been there, they just weren't seen as problems, there were no names for them or people hid it better. So if I hear such a claim, I need a good citation. Sure there are many reports of the bad situations in early industrialized cities. But how many reports of rural places that starved before had not been written because there was no one there to witness it? Cities did surely create their own breed of problems, there is no denying that, but cities also increased the visibility on problems that had existed elswhere as well.