The Banana Peel Project

Check out this post by Mel Blake. It’s definitely interesting. Here’s an excerpt:

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

I’m still not entirely sure, but I don’t think Blake’s being ironic.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how people use physics as a metaphor for social processes, but here’s an example of using both Newtonian physics and economics to talk about participation, technology, and attention as a zero-sum game. There’s nothing new about it–the idea that social processes can be quantified goes back to the 18th century.

It’s funny when people think they’re solving modern social ills but they’re actually just echoing the words of cavemen.