I recently read Clay Shirky's 'Cognitive Surplus'. He argues that for decades, technology (i.e. TV) encouraged us to squander our time and as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential, meaning that time previously wasted passively watching TV (the 'cognitive surplus') can now be put to use in new forms of collaboration and creativity enabled by the web, mobile and social media. And this is a good thing, because even posting captions on funny pictures of cats is a creative act, not passive consumption.
It occurs to me that, while this may be true for us as consumers, as workers in the media, the impact of technology is the reverse. Our jobs have become so much more complex and demanding, and the industry has become so stretched, and technology has made work and work-related stuff so pervasive and persistent that we suffer from what might be termed 'cognitive deficit': not enough time to think about anything properly because, in order to keep up, we're too busy calling and texting and blogging and tweeting and updating and checking in and networking and surfing and searching. To recover, what we need is a night veg-ing out in front of the telly.
Maybe I should work up this theory and blog post into a best-selling book. Unfortunately I don't have the free time.
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