Tal.

myself: I think you’re badly misreading the post. The point isn’t ‘televisions are bad’ or that everyone will always produce all the time. I was certainly consuming when I read Clay’s post :) The point is that consumption used to consume 100% of our media time, and that even the most impressive artifact of the new creation is a miniscule percentage of our media time. Therefore, if creation becomes even 1% of our media time, we should expect something like 20 new wikipedias a year. If creation becomes 10% of our media time then we should expect, from the US alone, something like 200 new wikipedia-like amounts of creation a year. You and I could quibble about whether 0.1% or 1% or 10% is a more reasonable number. But even if you assume that people will spend 100 times as much time consuming as they do creating, the sheer amount of new creation is still staggering to think about- 20 wikipedias! A year! Totally insane. Totally great, frankly.

Yeah, it’d be great if people spent 24/7 making and creating and thinking, but let’s face it, there are limits to how much we can and want to do. And, get this, different people have different limits. And some people have external factors that prevent them from being productive. Maybe people watch a lot of TV b/c they are tired and burned out from work.

But no, let’s just make fun of the TV watchers because clearly they’re just being lazy and not spending every waking moment working and thinking. How awful.