I don’t own a TV so all watching is done online. I also work meanwhile–as a sculptor and painter I can work, albeit somewhat less effectively, while watching.

I usually listen to audio books rather than watching shows, though, as they are, of course, much less visually distracting. I’ve found it very hard to actually sit down and read books lately because I’m so busy doing other stuff. Audio books allow me to be using my hands at the same time, and honestly except for a few parts I can do work just as effectively while listening to a book.

Sadly, I watch about two hours of TV a night as a break from being on my computer (for now, at least). D: I eat dinner whilst watching, so that’s more like 30 minutes that’s not a total waste followed by 90 minutes of laying in the recliner and trying not to fall asleep because recliners are fucking awesome.

I should go outside some time. But outside is mean to me. :[

Writing a good article doesn’t necessarily require specific knowledge of the Manual of Style or MediaWiki, though; if one person provides the sources and raw content, then a good wikignome can manage the rest.

I don’t watch very much TV besides Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. I do keep my Netflix queue pretty busy, though.

For some people editing Wikipedia is an adjunct to a previously existing hobby: If you’re actively involved in X it’s likely that you have the knowledge and interest needed to contributed to articles related to X. Alternatively, some people may be interested in a subject area but prior to Wikipedia there was no clear way that they could sink a lot of time into that interest, but documenting that subject area on Wikipedia is now one possibility. … and, of course, creating a freely licensed, freely available encyclopedia to help educate the world is a worthwhile and rewarding endeavor all on its own.

In any case, producing a decent quality Wikipedia article requires some very specific knowledge related to the styles and standards of Wikipedia as well as the technical features of the MediaWiki software. Once someone has invested the time needed to learn those things and gotten over the initial uncertainty about acting (I can really edit this? I won’t get in trouble?), they do seem to stick around and continue editing.

*I’m referencing that new NEO sweep telescope that covers the entire Northern night sky more often than every week. I forget its name. But its something like 10m stereo, so it will discover nearly all of the new objects out there while they are still far too distant for amateur scopes to pick up.

Check out some of the top contributors to the project. They have literally spent man-years on it.

I doubt, however, that in most cases these hobbyists, many of whom are becoming businessmen, are shifting time away from TV to their crafts. Rather, their crafts are displacing their regular employment, as the hobbyist discovers that there is actually a demand for their finished product at a price that, at times, exceeds the cost of purchasing the equipment and raw materials required to produce it.

Wikipedia is a curious hobby in that it costs almost nothing to participate, and yields almost no opportunity for financial reward, even for the best and the brightest. Even the opportunities for recognition are limited.

So… I decided to drastically cut back on my TV usage, but I soon found that even while making a conscious effort to cut back the future projected hours spend were still rather large: It was just too easy to ‘default’ to TV watching when no other activity was urgently demanding my attention. When an opportunity came up to get rid of my TV completely I took it. I have never regretted that decision.

Someplace around here I have a portable TV which would be theoretically useful to checkout the news in the event of an emergency … but I suppose that with analog NTSC going off the air soon that won’t be a possibility much longer.

I do watch a fair number of movies … but I don’t do the whole TV sitcoms via the computer thing, except in the rare situation that I can watch and am interested in watching an entire show all at once (or at least across contiguous set of days). That way the time investment is bound and known in advance. … and I’m not left dragging along for years like some junkie waiting for his next fix. :) I watched Serenity like that.

… and, of course, there is the classic form of passive entertainment .. reading. But even my reading activity is somewhat confined these days…. I do most of it on planes, typically finishing a normal length novel in each direction to and from the west coast.

One of the recent trends on the Internet that bothers me a lot is the needless use of video to express things which can be expressed perfectly well in text. I have no dislike of video itself, but the video medium forces me to accept the authors *timing*. It’s no exaggeration that a video of a speech can often take 5x longer for me to watch and read… and while there is a some value from hearing a speakers intonation, especially for speakers whos writing styles are not well conveyed in text, it would be surprising to see that additional value offset the time consumed.

mplayer -speed 1.5 -af scaletempo is my friend a lot these days.. -speed 2 is even better, but some things are easy to miss that way.

All that said, I think the talk of TV and sitcoms dying is probably a vast overstatement. Recent studies claim that TV viewership is at an all time high…. certainly reports of its demise must be *a bit* exaggerated. ;)

I’d argue that Wikipedia editing appears to largely come from people at work in offices, as well as university students… perhaps leveraging the slack time created differential efficiency of computer equipped workers and students vs their historic non-equipped counterparts. ::shrugs::

I expect that the social circles that Clay Shirky travels in include a lot of people who in past decades would still have been spending considerable time on things other than passive entertainment, things like Amateur radio, automotive hot-rodding, woodworking, siege engines, etc. ;)

Kelly suggested to me that the real effect of the Internet might just be making all those niche interests a lot more visible to people outside of them, including Mr. Shriky. … and that the participation in those alternative pursuits may not have increased much at all. To me this seems like a more reasonable explanation of the evidence than the notion that TV viewership has been displaced even though it is reportedly at an all time high.

TiVo has really cut down on my television addiction.

Worse, as I recall from one of my old political science courses, studies of voters have shown that most people are not capable of abstract reasoning. For instance, ask most people to define “liberal” or “conservative,” and they’ll give you a definition that actually describes the talking points of the Democratic or Republican party. (I suspect this is why we’ve declared so many wars on abstract concepts). So television does fill a need, although it also creates its own reality for these people, which is a dangerous thing.

On a lighter note, I’ve only recently gotten into Jdrama, and just a few at that. Working on a series called Akihabara@DEEP, about nerd culture in Akihabara, and pretty soon I’ll watch the live-action adaptation of Honey & Clover. (Incidentally, if you want to see something totally out of your normal anime range, watch the anime version of Honey & Clover, which is fantastically beautiful. The live-action movie adaptation was merely fair). I’ve been warned by many people that Asian dramas are basically designed to draw you in and make you watch them through their end, like some sort of melodramatic drug.

On an irregular basis, I also watch all of the usual 18-25 male demographic shows: Stewart, Colbert, ATHF, Family Guy, Simpsons, South Park, Mythbusters, The Office. I watch live concert recordings every once in a while, and have a soft spot for very early MTV. And then there’s re-watching my 150+ DVDs, or watching the 20+ DVDs that I own but haven’t had time to watch. And then there’s the Internet, and information arbitrage. And what if I want to do something else, like start learning Japanese again (I’ve recently been turned on to Mnemosyne as a study aid), or take up music, or grad school, or travel? It’s not where we find time, it’s all in how we prioritize it. TV is just one of those things, and while I will admit that I think our brains are hard-wired to be addicted to things like half-hour sitcoms or funny YouTube clips, it’s still entirely our fault if we’re not doing the things we really want to. The question that has always bugged me is, “What would I be doing with my time if telecommunications, computers, and high-speed travel didn’t exist?”

By the way, have you seen The Prisoner? Probably the best television series ever made.

And yes, I’m addicted to the Internet too. This is quite a unique age in human history. Never before has the average man had overwhelming amounts of information at his fingertips. Do you think, if television was just coming into vogue now, that it would catch on at all? I think the only reason television is as big as it is now is because of its cultural inertia, because it definitely can’t compete on a standalone basis with the likes of the web.

Unfortunately, I still have trouble finding the time, mostly because of the number of blogs I read.