Clay Shirky, previously featured here for his book Here Comes Everybody, has provoked a lot of interest through another proposition. Adapted from a conference talk related to Web 2.0, Shirky knit together a surprising combination of elements identified in the title:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

His first contention is that television sitcoms served the same sociological midwifery role during the American post-WWII ‘leisure age’ as gin during the Industrial Revolution. First it might help to understand just what gin had to do with anything. The history of gin is actually quite fascinating: first concocted as a medical elixir for kidney disorders by Dr. Franciscus Sylvius in 17th century Holland, gin is distilled from grain mash and flavored with juniper berries—hence its name, derived from the French for juniper, “genièvre.” It was adopted by the British military for its fortifying effects, earning it the nickname “Dutch courage.” The low cost of production compared to whisky and brandy—gin used low-grade grain unsuitable for other purposes—helped secure it as a favorite among the British lower classes. Further encouragement came due to punitive taxes placed on French wines and liquors under William of Orange, making the import of Dutch gin even more attractive. By 1700, 5 million gallons were consumed, almost a gallon per person; by 1710, the rate had grown to 19 million gallons.

Eventually the resulting widespread drunkenness led to attempts to reduce its influence. The Gin Act of 1729 increased the retail tax. The Gin Act of 1736 increased taxes on both retail licenses and sales, creating a boisterous black market and eventually triggering riots in London in 1743. By this time, despite the prohibition, consumption was about 2 gallons per person. The Gin Act of 1751 attempted to recreate a ‘respectable’ market by lowering license fees but tying licenses to rented properties. By 1757, the initial ‘gin craze’ had passed and farmers were less incented due to increased grain costs. The next wave came with the 1820’s development of a malaria treatment derived from quinidine dissolved in cheap alcohol, created the gin & tonic. With the British empire facing widespread risk from malaria in its tropical holdings, the gin & tonic became again widely adopted, prompting later admiration from no less than Winston Churchill:

“The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the empire.”

Its role in the Industrial Revolution finally appeared in the 1950s in Northern Britain, where coal miners and textile workers relied on the “bistouille” (gin in coffee) for breakfast and refreshments of gin and beer at “estaminets” to help them cope with the hard labor. As the economic benefits of the Revolution expanded the middle class, and licensing demands were introduced by the various Gin Acts, the working-class takeaway ‘dram shop’ gave way to the ‘gin palace,’ a more upscale establishment that presaged the later development of Victorian pubs. By the 1920s, gin made its way into the American bathtub via Prohibition and even transformed itself into the sophisticate’s choice with a splash of vermouth and olive as the gin martini. Curiously, gin production peaked in the 1930s, just as WWII loomed and another social pacifier began its ascent.

The effects of WWII on the American economy were profound: the G.I. Bill greatly expanded the educated workforce; a surging production economy had been established; and global competition was disadvantaged by massive rebuilding efforts necessary in Europe, Russia and parts of Asia. Quality of life was also improving due to increased life expectancy during the 20th century, increasing from 47 years in 1900 to 77 years in 1998; and better working conditions, such as the establishment of a nationwide 8-hour working day with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The collective effect was to increase the amount of free time available to American workers above even the gains achieved during the Industrial Revolution following improvements in technology and the formation of labor unions (recall that prior to the Industrial Revolution was the agrarian age, characterized by backbreaking sunup-to-sundown work cycles). Shirky suggests that television sitcoms helped consume this new surplus of time in passive leisure; by example, he notes that:

“Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.”

Of course it has been advanced that sitcoms provided much more than a time sink, but also served to manufacture a common experience among a nation beset by racial, political, and social ferment. As idealistic and unrepresentative as they were of the travails of their time, shows like Leave It To Beaver through to The Cosby Show arguably acted as a kind of collective signpost of what the American Dream might represent—a programmatic “city on a hill” as evoked by demagogues ranging from John Winthrop to Ronald Reagan.

At last we come to the more interesting turn in Shirky’s speech. Television viewing is on the wane, following a series of setbacks from the decoupling agents of DVR and online distribution to the most recent Writers’ Guild strike. Similar complaints are levied by established interests in the music and movie industries, who see declining CD sales and theater viewings. What are we doing with our time, then? Shirky gives the example of the debate on Wikipedia over the delisting of Pluto as a planet, which absorbed tremendous attention and time from a sizable group of contributors. The response from a television interviewer is, “where do people find the time?” And that myopia speaks volumes of how slow the broadcast media institutions have come to the realization that their grip on public attention has slackened. (A counterpoint might be to point to the recent network upfronts, which suggest a much more defensive stance with minimal investment into new shows other than the ‘unscripted’ variety.)

The answer Shirky gives is staggering in its calculation, even undocumented:

“If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought…And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.”

Put together, that means the American viewing public spends the equivalent of building Wikipedia watching ads each weekend. The obvious follow-up questions regarding the potential in reapplying that ‘cognitive surplus’ explain the relevance of this whole thought process to Web 2.0, which defines itself as the socially-connected response to a static, broadcast-only Web 1.0. The theme of interactivity as central also brings in the continued propagation of gaming further into mainstream, borne on the success of Nintendo’s focus on casual gamers with the DS and Wii. Shirky closes with an anecdote about a friend’s four-year-old daughter who stopped watching a movie and went behind the TV “looking for the mouse.” As the latest generation grows up in an always-connected world, with computers and consoles increasingly taking the place of television, with passive media existing as only an option rather than the default, what mindset will they bring to the world as they enter the workforce?

Addendum: If sitcoms are to the Television Age what gin was to the Industrial Age, I would propose that the analogue in the Computer Age is Solitaire. In addition to its ubiquity in customer service departments, at least twice I have found that relatives who have little use for their computers other than occasional email or web browsing make regular use of Solitaire. One was insistent that their new Vista laptop was essentially broken since it came without the game pre-installed (Vista Business Edition excludes the default games, presumably to try and prevent the corporate timesinks that are Solitaire and Minesweeper). Incidentally, as an example of one of those UI quirks that perhaps Mark Hamburg was hired to help address in the Windows user experience, the unintuitive remedy to add Solitaire back into Vista Business was to use “Uninstall a Program.”

[EB: Gin, Industrial Revolution]