Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

In the short story “ Gin, Television, and Social Surplus,” written by Clay Shirky is about how the amount of television is affecting our society from becoming productive. People today don’t realize how much free time they have and how productive we can be with our free time. Shirky explains that if even the smallest amount of people realized the amount of time they spend watching television and decided to cut back on it we would be so much productive and would make more time for cognitive surplus. The average human in the U.S spends 200 billion hours of a year of human thought watching television and 100 billion hours on ads when we could be using the billions of hours thinking about how to make our country better. The only problem is that people don’t think very much of how much they are thinking of television and the show they are watching when they are watching television and that we need to help people realize this. Clay says biggest concern is how to slowly make people realize how much they are using their cognitive surplus on useless unproductive things, when they can use it and deploy it into other productive things to make it useful.

            Clay Shirky was very optimistic in this short story but only talks about how television affects us as humans where else, Sherry Turkle talks about how multiple technology devices affect a person and our society.