Looking not for the mouse, but for the edit button
Clay Shirky made a long blog post that’s now catching the usual attention from Boing Boing and Smart Mobs et al. In Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody, he discusses the role that sitcoms have played in American leisure time, and how that role is gradually being replaced by more participatory endeavors like Wikipedia.
At the end of the speech/post, he tells a story about a friend’s four-year old daughter, who was watching a Dora video and immediately began crawling around the back of the TV “looking for the mouse”. The assumption of participation is natural for today’s children, he says, and goes on to imply that that assumption will become more widespread.
I’ll confess that I already “look for the mouse”, as it were. In my case, though, it’s the “edit” button on blog posts and news stories and timeshifting capabilities on radio broadcasts and occasionally a conversation (”wait, what did he say?”). It’s a substantial a shock for me to spend an hour cleaning up a dodgy biography of a living person and then find that some of the cited sources are themselves poorly done. My instinct in these cases is to fix the problem myself — {{sofixit}} isn’t just a snarky template, it’s a way of life — and it’s infuriating when I find that I can’t.
Shirky’s smaller point, that Wikipedia editors “find the time” because they aren’t passively consuming content, also rings true for me. Aside from a few (frakking brilliant) shows, I rarely watch television any more. Instead, in my free time, I’m editing a wiki, or playing a video game, or baking, or cooking, or perhaps eventually playing rugby — in short, anything but camping out in front of “Deal or No Deal”. This pattern of behavior has been growing over the past few years, mostly because I’d rather involve my brain and hands and entire body than sit there blankly.
I don’t speak for all wiki editors, though, and I’m curious to know what other Wikimedia-connected folks think about Shirky’s article. Does he have a point? Is participatory culture a natural outgrowth of modern Western society?
Tags: Wikipedia
3 comments
We’ve been discusisng this on Cyde’s blog. I personally think that Clay is experiencing a combination of lensing effects caused by his too-close proximity to Web 2.0 hubbub and his likely-atypical social companions. Greg Maxwell pointed out that TV viewership is reportedly at all-time highs, which doesn’t seem to jive with Clay’s thesis. It’s a provocative piece, but I remain unconvinced that it is accurate in its conclusions.
/me comments on Cyde’s blog and subscribes to Cyde’s RSS feed. Thanks for the link!
I see your point about lensing, but Clay’s argument implies that this massive social shift (from passive to active cultural participation) is just beginning. In that regard, TV viewership figures won’t reflect the shift for another few years.
Glad to see television (the crippling electrode ray nipple) being replaced by wikis and such, that enrich and create value.
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