Why I do what I do for the LabVIEW community.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

This video is awesome. I am now a fan of Clay Shirky. After watching this video, I've decide to ban the following phrases from LAVA: "Where do you find the time" and "Someone has too much time on their hands". If this doesn't motivate you to turn off the boob tube and write a LabVIEW Wiki article, submit code to the Code Repository, help out with OpenG or be public about your passion for LabVIEW, I don't know what will. If you can't watch this video at work then take the time to watch it at home. (note: it's about 16mins. long)

[Yair]

I'm not sure I completely agree with his point. People have always been creating stuff and other people have always been consuming it. Obviously, now people have a new medium where they can do things they couldn't do before, but that does not mean that they will. Some will, some won't.

To refer specifically to one of his examples, I don't think that watching Scrubs is necessarily mindless. I haven't watched it in a long time, but it happens to be a reasonably clever show which does require some attention. There are other quality creations on TV, and they are also valid even when they don't require you to do anything.

I'm not disagreeing with the claim that doing something is good, just with the claim that doing "nothing" is almost necessarily bad. Perhaps distilling it to "doing almost nothing is necessarily bad", but I don't think that's necessarily true either.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE (Yen @ May 2 2008, 05:30 AM)

I'm not disagreeing with the claim that doing something is good, just with the claim that doing "nothing" is almost necessarily bad. Perhaps distilling it to "doing almost nothing is necessarily bad", but I don't think that's necessarily true either.

Yen I think you take it a little to literal. Critisizing the massive amount of time our western society spends consuming more or less informative or useful TV does not mean that one wants to say TV nor doing nothing is bad at all. But on the other hand a large part of TV consumation is not very productive in any way other than keeping some people of the streets (which in itself could be a welcom cause for some although not a sufficient one for me).

No human can be fully active 24 hours a day without getting a burn out pretty fast. But I do believe that lots of things that should actually be done are not getting done because it is so much easier to sit on a sofa and watch some more or less stupid repetition of what has been shown 100 of times before. I can understand to some extend that someone wants to watch Big Brother once or twice to see what it is about. I can not bring up much understanding that this kind of program is being repeated times after time on I don't know how many channels since many years and people still keep watching. It's this kind of TV that makes me support many of Clay Sharky's statements.

And I do believe that something has to change. And his message may help to wake up some and realize that life is not just about sitting in front of a TV screen and consumation in general and the necessary devil of work to support that, but that there is a lot more to it than that.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[PaulG.]

He makes some good points, but life is balance, Michaelson. I love my work but sometimes the last thing I want to see waiting for me at home is a VI, and the first thing I want to see is that "mindless" episode of Lost I missed last night.

[Aristos Queue]

QUOTE (PaulG. @ May 2 2008, 12:23 PM)

but sometimes the last thing I want to see waiting for me at home is a VI

It's that word "sometimes" that is the key. :-) I think the most important statement was the "a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken." Because after you watch that episode of "Lost", you probably want to go Google some bizzare sequence of numbers or figure out the significance of a strange symbol they found somewhere on the island. Or write to the authors and suggest that next episode, they should make a harder puzzle for the audience than merely the sequence of masses of each of the planets in the solar system times the atomic weight of the first nine elements on the periodic table. The small bits of feedback are in many ways more important than the major projects, and television misses even that small bit of feedback. And if the content doesn't justify the ads, then you will go work on that VI.

And you never know... a running LV diagram might just show up in an episode of Lost. :-)

[jaegen]

While I agree with most of his points, as a father of a 4-year old daughter (and therefore having survived through many episodes of Dora the Explorer) I do feel it's my responsibility to point out one thing. He glosses over an important detail in his "broken screen" story: Several scenes in every Dora the Explorer episode feature an animated mouse pointer, which moves around and "clicks" on appropriate parts of the scene. The 4-year old is simply looking for the mouse that's moving the pointer (having obviously been exposed to a mouse-driven computer already).

Jaegen

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Of course there is a balance in everything. But it's a fact that todays generation are more active producers than passive consumers. I've been having discussions with my 11 year old daughter lately on what the story is going to be for her next youtube video. Regardless of the outcome, the fact that she feels that she has a story to tell and that it seems totally natural for her to take control of this is great.

[jbrohan]

It's the size of the cognitive surplus that interests me. Maybe even the most far-out projects can get some traction. It's not just for professors and lab-researchers any more. We can all do it. on /. there's an article about do it yourself table displays for a few hundred bucks.

My (current) favourite is to record a LOT of utterances about a subject eg. help group meetings for Asperger families, and then analyze them looking for repeated threads. Like "they rarely lie" They obey laws"; these are strong characteristics, but weaker ones could help an early diagnosis which seems key to treatment.

John

[LAVA 1.0 Content]

Its Saturday morning and I had a chance to watch the video. Here are my random thoughts.

1) According to the Wiki vs TV time stats, Alfa's estimate should be reduced to 99.95%.

2) My son has been predicting the death of TV for the last 7 years due to the lack of interactivity. He looks at me and asks "Why do you want to watch a movie when you have no control over the plot and it always ends the same way?"

3) Where do we fit into this game if contributing to the forums is our way of "wasting time"?

4) Rest ( non-productive time) is part of our nature. Mindlessly watching TV is a form of rest and should not count against us as a species.

5) Maryann was definately the cuter of the two.

Ben

[PaulG.]

QUOTE (neB @ May 3 2008, 10:28 AM)

5) Maryann was definately the cuter of the two.

Ben

I was more partial to Ginger. I would want to take MaryAnn home to meet Mom. But I just wanted to take Ginger home. Grrrrrowlll...

[Yair]

QUOTE (rolfk @ May 2 2008, 02:35 PM)

Yen I think you take it a little to literal.

Probably, and for what it's worth, I don't watch any of those shows. The stuff I watch is usually either documentary or shows which some thought was put into.

One example would be Lost. Unlike Paul, I don't watch it "mindlessly". I watched since the beginning because I like it. I don't like it for its soap opera style plots (like some people I know) nor for its "experience" ("ooh, it happens in 2006 and if you add those numbers you get 8 which is one of the numbers!" or "ooh, if you go to that website you get a lot more details". That's like being a trekkie). I like it because it's done very well (e.g. cinematography, music) and because watching and following it is a challenge, just like a puzzle. In that respect, the great attention to minute details does matter.

I think that things like that are worth watching, but I also agree it's benefitial that people do other, productive, things as well.

P.S. I also think CS is a great speaker.

QUOTE (neB @ May 3 2008, 05:28 PM)

He looks at me and asks "Why do you want to watch a movie when you have no control over the plot and it always ends the same way?"

For the same reason you would want to read a book or listen to a piece of music or look at a painting. The same reason that will cause professional TV not to disappear. It's a valid form of art or entertainment. Regardless of how much people do this in their free time, eventually you need people working full time to produce high quality material over a length of time and just like choose your adventure did not replace Tolkein or Dostoyevsky, so will interactive movies (which have actually sort of been around for a long time in the form of adventure games) not replace TV.

By the way, I don't think that anyone considers contributing here to be "wasting time". You're both helping people and participating in a community and those have value even if you're not "creating" anything.

[crelf]

QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ May 2 2008, 03:01 AM)

This video is awesome.

I really enjoyed it too - I like that he wasn't extreme in that he said watching TV is a mindless waste of time, but also that if we could harness only the smallest amount for participation then imagine what we could do. This video is the why, here's what he sees as the how (this one is ~42 mins long):

[Wire Warrior]

Am I missing something? I didn't see the link to the 42 min video?

As for the more TV/less TV, it seems to be a rather basic concept if you boil it down. A participant will always add more than a spectator. To me its no different than saying if more people farmed there would be more food available. The underlying concept is almost a tautology to me.

[JDave]

The general message that he gave really made sense to me. I purposefully don't have any TV reception (no satellite, cable, etc.). Partly because I don't like it when I do watch and partly because I would sit and watch it anyway and waste too much time. The idea that we could spend more time producing and sharing things also works for me.

Certainly many people watch too much TV, but then some people spend too much time monitoring Wikipedia articles. Definitely there needs to be a balance. What people need to do is sit back and ask "What is important to me?" Then we need to make sure we are spending time on those important things.

I reject the idea that interactive entertainment is inherently better than non-interactive. I think it is a reasonable idea to ask 'Can this be made better by making it interactive?' By adding a mouse, as he puts it. But it would be taking it too far to say interactive is always better. It almost sounded like he was saying that, though I doubt he really believes that. Books and movies and theatre will still be around centuries from now. Life is what we make of it, but it is also how we react to what others make of it.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

QUOTE (jasonw @ May 7 2008, 02:23 PM)

Am I missing something? I didn't see the link to the 42 min video?

Probably because your employer is blocking Youtube:

that lets you bypass the corporate overlords UltimateUnblock.

Just type in the URL of any Youtube video in the field and voila!

[orko]

QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ May 8 2008, 02:11 AM)

BTW, I found this site that lets you bypass the corporate overlords UltimateUnblock.

Just type in the URL of any Youtube video in the field and voila!

Cool! Where was this during my last employment!??