On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:04 PM, wiki
<doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
But..... where we are in competition with others
is for the time of the
undergraduate/graduate who sits down to squander some time on the internet.
He's got any number of choices - what we draw him to Wikipedia and make him
stick around? I wonder that the downturn in Wikipedia contributions is due
largely to their being more "grown up" social networking phenomena than
there were in 2004. Now, it is tempting to say that the fact that the
"myspacers" have buggered off is not bad thing - but I wonder how many
intelligent, educated people are now squandering time on Facebook who once
might have been Wikipedia contributors?
I've had similar thoughts, but more general, thinking that the
internet in general has more potential for people to "waste their
time" than ever before. How many scientific theorems and great books
and works of art are going to be left undone because people are
wasting their time on Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and the like (and
all the other websites and other online distractions out there)? You
would *hope* that the truly exceptional in each generation avoid such
traps and fulfil their potential, harnessing the power of the internet
rather than being sucked into a churning maw, but you never know. And
yes, I do think being a Wikipedia editor is more productive than using
Facebook and Twitter. :-)
My god, this is getting serious.
Maybe we should ban cafes.
And bars.
And these movie theater things...
And what's this all about with this Television thing, now, it's
clearly just wrongheaded...
Actual work, and the average portion of actual work that people do on
a volunteer basis, isn't changing much. How people socialize is, but
people are social animals. We do that. We're wired to do it. We're
supposed to do it. Anyone who thinks that 14 hour workdays 7 days a
week is preferable to the usual 8x5 is welcome to their obsession, but
will stand alone. The work product of normal humans that don't
socialize enough drops off, according to numerous professional studies
over many decades. There's a reason most workweeks are targeted at 40
hrs. That's the maximum you can get out of average "information
workers" before they drop overall output.
We get a slice. It's not an insignificant slice. We can do better
with utilizing it, but we're doing pretty damn well all things
considered.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com