Gin and the Cognitive Surplus

I just don't get how this is "genius" material, other than he has cleverly found a way to state what we all know already: there is always a better way to spend your free time.

I don't think this is the result of the information age or thre result of the industrial age. It has always been that way. You could go and get drunk with your friends every day after work. Or you spend some time with your family and kids. Or you could read a book. Or you could volunteer your time. You could edit an article in Wikipedia. You could sleep.

How does a society magically "wake up from a bender"? Isn't that like a mathematician saying, "then a mircale happens" as part of a proof? Will people's heads just explode if they don't watch an episode of Gilligan's Island? Isn't some of the most moving and thought-provoking material on TV from sitcoms like MASH and All in the Family? I just don't buy it. It all comes down to making smart choices about how you spend your spare time.

His point wasn't that TV is a waste of time... his point was that people want to know where they get the free time to do things like Wikipedia, and his point was that is an absurd question because people have so much free time given how much of it they spend watching TV. I think you're focusing on the wrong emphasis from his point. It isn't that TV is this horrible thing that has no meaning... it's that if you want to find some free time, you can probably cut out your TV time... In addition, society is moving toward an age where we don't want to sit down in front of a TV at a set time to get our programming, we want it delivered on demand when we want it where we want it, and we want to interact with it in ways that we haven't been interacting with traditional TV before.

He says nothing full of terms lifted from science. Nothing here at all you didn't know.

Hype and nothing else. Is watching Simpsons or The World at War or the News a bigger waste of time than flaming people on SL or WofWC?

Again, I think that's not the point. Obviously everyone of us knows that if you skip watching a TV show, you have more spare time. His entire point is that there is this huge surplus of people's spare time out there waiting to be tapped for the 'next big thing', and Web 2.0 (or Web 2.0-like initiatives) may be one vehicle for tapping that massive cognitive surplus and turning it into something useful. The point of his lecture isn't to prove that people are wasting time watching TV, the point of his lecture is to prove that people have enough time to accomplish truly great things, provided they feel motivated enough to stop watching reruns of Gilligan's Island.