Expats here in Buenos Aires could take this to heart easily:Pink: A few days ago, I was talking with someone about Wikipedia. And the guy shook his head dismissively and said about the people who contribute to it: “Where do they get the time?” We both think that’s a silly question.
Shirky: It is. People have had lots of free time for as long as there’s been the industrialized world. But that free time has mainly been something to be used up rather than used, especially in postwar America, with the rise of suburbanization and long commutes. Suddenly we no longer lived in tight-knit communities and therefore we spent less time interacting face-to-face. As a result, we ended up spending the bulk of our free time watching television.
1 comment:
Yeah, nobody in the big city watches television . . .
I'm a big fan of cities and actually sympathetic to the idea expressed in that blurb, but the whole "tight-knit communities" thing and its ilk has always struck me as a liberal (in the bad American sense) fantasy. An imagined utopian version of some previous America (or world) that never actually existed, as it were.
Everybody likes to watch television, unfortunately.
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