How many hours per week do you spend watching television? How many hours per week do you spend watching dumb Internet video clips, checking out the latest Lolcats from the icanhascheeseburger site or communicating about nothing on Facebook? Current theories from leading writers on the issue suggest that the latter activities are a sign of human progress whereas if you’re stuck passively watching TV then you’re living in a wasteful time of the past.

A major voice in this discussion is Clay Shirky, the NYU professor and bestselling author featured in the video at the top of this post. Shirky promotes a simple argument: doing something is better than doing nothing. This means that if people have the time to sit around and submit different photos to LOLcats then at least they’re doing something rather than passively taking in television entertainment. As long as we are rich enough to afford to have some leisure, we should be using that leisure time to do something creative.

That’s definitely a sound argument. It’s certainly better to engage in some act of creativity, however stupid, than to do nothing at all with our time. However, is Shirky’s argument that this is a true sign of creative progress really correct? Or is it simplifying things too much? Is it really smarter and more creative to contribute something to a site like RateMyPoo instead of watching an important historical documentary? Shirky’s argument is definitely interesting … and appealing to those of us who want an excuse to enjoy our LOLcats every day. It just might be a bit simplistic in its approach to defining human progress.

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