Does TV really rot my brain?
Are you familiar with Hu.lu? They have a commercial in which Al.ec Bal.dwin plays the part of an alien. He indicates that television is being used to mush our brains into a cottage cheese substance so that the aliens can scoop them out with a melon baller! It is a witty commercial that got my attention, but perhaps for a reason they didn't intend?
In reading some RSS feeds on the internet this morning, I somehow arrived at this particular link, and it relates so well to something I have been thinking about: "free time". Here is an excerpt that gives you the gist of his discussion:
"...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. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of 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. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is..."
I am not bashing TV watching - I do it, probably always will do some of it. What is interesting is this: I do have time to watch some TV (aka "I have free time), so I should always be at least somewhat cognitive of what I am using my free time for. TV is about as passive of an activity as there is... perhaps I could do something (anything) that would exercise my neurons a little more! :)
In reading some RSS feeds on the internet this morning, I somehow arrived at this particular link, and it relates so well to something I have been thinking about: "free time". Here is an excerpt that gives you the gist of his discussion:
"...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. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of 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. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is..."
I am not bashing TV watching - I do it, probably always will do some of it. What is interesting is this: I do have time to watch some TV (aka "I have free time), so I should always be at least somewhat cognitive of what I am using my free time for. TV is about as passive of an activity as there is... perhaps I could do something (anything) that would exercise my neurons a little more! :)
<< Home