Clay Shirky will be a speaker at Supernova 2008. Some great insight from a keynote earlier this year:
“I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way
back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the
critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution,
was gin.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. The stories from that era
are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the
streets of London.And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender
that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public
libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children,
elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all
of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started
seeming like an asset.It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic
surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we
started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century,
the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off
the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the
Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per
capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and,
critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work
weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of
its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to
manage before–free time.And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched
Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate
Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of
cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have
built up and caused society to overheat.”