It's a fact: TV sitcoms destroy your brain. But what else can you do with all that unused mental power?
Preview buttons are there for a reason-BeanBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
It's one of the most powerful and disorienting and disturbing feelings I've ever known and perhaps the very best reason I can think of that I now watch very little mainstream TV, much less sitcoms, much less those howlingly soul-deadening laugh-tracked things featuring Kelsey Grammar or Charlie Sheen or maybe that enormous guy from "Everybody Loves Raymond," shows that make your soul curdle like fresh soy milk in the sun. It's also the sole reason I've trained myself to instantly mute all TV commercials when they appear and turn my gaze from their grisly carnage lest their death lasers of hyperbranded idiocy penetrate my flesh and make me impotent and encephalitic and Republican.
The feeling is this: You're sitting there zoning out in front of some mindless slew of shows and you're sucked in and not laughing in the slightest and actually only remotely amused, even as, deep down, some benumbed part of you is quietly screaming, oh sweet Jesus with an old "Will & Grace" DVD, why the hell am I watching this swill? It's not even funny or interesting or even all that entertaining?
And then three or four or nine hours into your TV drone, you begin get that slimy feeling on your skin and your face is all oily and your jaw is slack and your genitalia feel all shriveled and your heart is palpitating strangely, and you finally say, OK that's enough, and shut the damnable TV off, and wham.
That's when it happens. The sledgehammer. The slap. The roaring silence. Suddenly the room caves in and the walls shudder and your brain snaps back to life and you leap back into your wary body. Ah yes, reality. Action and movement and thought. Here we are again.
I hate that feeling. I hate that sodden realization that TV has just sapped enormous chunks of my soul, removed me entirely from all physical and cognitive and spiritual functioning. At least if I'm wasting time on the Net, I like to think I'm usually doing something -- reading, learning, seeking, sifting, clicking around, taking in information. Aren't I?
It's a notion that comes to mind as I read about NYU New Media prof Clay Shirky's popular notion of the "cognitive surplus," a nifty, Malcolm Gladwellish idea he defines as that huge heaping mountain of extra brainpower, all that mental capacity we've had at our disposal since the Industrial Revolution freed us up from all those pesky tasks of, you know, basic survival -- but which, for the past 50 years or so, we've chosen to dump right at the feet of the idiot box merely because, well, we just didn't know what else to do with it.
Shirky goes so far as to calculate that Americans watch close to 200 billion hours of TV a year, each and every hour wasted potential. Nothing new there. But by contrast, he estimates Wikipedia -- the entire, massive, impressive project of it -- required about 100 million hours of thought. In other words, thanks to the Net, a tiny sliver of that cognitive surplus was finally put to use online, and look what a useful, powerful thing it created.
Imagine if that caught on. Imagine if even a fraction of everyone who watched TV now decided to switch to doing something - anything - on the Net that involved some sort of social networking, some glorious Web 2.0 process, something interactive and collaborative and even a tiny bit engaged. Who knows what incredible projects might evolve?
Shirky, like many Web 2.0 evangelists, thinks we're entering a far more interactive, user-generated, participatory age wherein we are finally snapping out of our collective TV stupor and demanding a far more active role in our media. In other words, no longer is the Net-connected generation content to be passive, drooling consumers of whatever media conglomerates shovel our way. We now demand some semblance of control. We demand feedback loops and mouse buttons and comment fields and the ability to customize the experience, and Shirky deems this a powerful and amazing thing, on par with the Industrial Revolution in how it could transform public life and reshape and reinvigorate culture.
I'm not so sure. It's a slick and intriguing idea and I'm actually with him most of the way, right up until you think about, well, art, and independent thought, and creativity, and just about anything of true imaginative value because sweet Shiva with an iPod and a Chris Ware book, if social networking is the future of creativity, the future is bland indeed.
Here is the fatal flaw in all the Web 2.0 mania currently sweeping dot-comland: Fact is, Wikipedia's unusual success aside, few things are worse in this human world than creation by committee, by crowd and consumer and the masses. Few things destroy true vision and the integrity of a unique idea more than bowing to the forces of groupthink.
The examples are legion, eternal, painful: You want to destroy a unique TV show? Run it by lots of focus groups. Want to maul a good film? Hire a team to write the script. You want to annihilate a great piece of architecture? A school? A park? Let city government choose its design. Want to destroy a great website experience? Strip away all editorial voice and kill all actual content and let users generate the entire sloppy hollow product and call it a "portal." Or maybe "MySpace."
See, I still want immersion. I want to feel the full expression of the artist, the filmmaker, the writer, the journalist, the individual. I don't want to walk into an art gallery and have the ability to change a painting's colors on a silly whim. I don't want to read a book and be able to change a character's name or even pick a particular cover design to match my couch. I don't want to click the remote and choose which characters die or select an alternate ending. If I want to interact with my DVD, I'll just buy porn, you know?
All the whining about major media aside, do we all not still want talent and expertise and professionalism? Whatever the hell it is you consume, don't you want to feel the sweet or sour tang of true human thought behind it, to sense that the person who created it knew what the hell they were doing, had a semblance of skill and talent? Of course you do.
So yes, sure, let's get more people off the couch and onto the Web and let's get them interacting and creating funky collectives and collaborations and maybe indeed we'll end up creating a thousand more Wikipedias and even a few Flickrs and YouTubes and notcot.orgs, harness the cognitive surplus of the world and combine our individual knowledge in new and unfathomable ways that will take us to the next stage of entertainment and enlightenment. Sure, sounds lovely.
Then again, maybe not. Because with a precious handful of exceptions, the last thing the world needs is more groupthink. We simply need more visionaries.
Mushroom-Farm TV. I have noticed a very slight but persistent downtrend in his viewing time, and he still hates the fiscal irresponsibility and gay-marriage BS. One of these days he's gonna break an axle running over a pothole or see a bridge in town collapse due to 
