http://timbauer.bauerfive.com/2008/05/07/clay-shirky-author-the-world-is-drunk-on-tv/

(plus my scribble as I watched it at the bottom) but I think Clay is on to something in that society might be ready to move from one distraction (tv) that doesn’t produce much value … to another (interaction via the web … trumping distraction)

We have a PVR. To me these things are so wonderful precisely because they turn the later into the former automatically. A lot of TV is watched because it’s not time to go to bed yet. The PVR doesn’t give me that time back, but does let me gain more from that time.

Also, I am thankful of Clay’s points; stating the obvious is sometimes required. The Greeks had the mythology of the Sirens who enthralled men’s minds while their bodies rotted. 200 billion hours of TV per year in the USA alone seems to me to put “doing something is better than doing nothing” squarely in the “needs to be said again” category.

In which case, thank God there are people like Clay around, because I’d *never* have thought up that one myself :)

But seriously, Clay’s point rests on the idea that watching something, consuming something, is “doing nothing”. That’s nonsensical, of course: does Clay believe, for example, that I’m wasting my time if I listen to a Mozart sonata, too?

It’s ironic, too, that Clay’s point has been made in a video. Does the fact that I watch the video on the net, rather than on a computer, somehow imbue it with some magical “positive” ingredient?

P.S. Thanks for giving the lecture in Weymouth last night Roo. Very interesting.

We need someone enterprising to replicate WLW functionality in an Adobe Air based app, so we can have the same cool tool no matter what platform we are on.

Recently, as part of our company’s ISO14000 certification, we were requested to include the said ‘environmental’ signature in our emails.