People came home after World War II, got houses, kids, moved to the suburbs, and got 9 to 5 jobs. The nice thing about a 9-5 job is it generally leaves your evenings free. With new technology and modern conveniences, we were no longer washing clothes by hand until nightfall. Suddenly we had a lot of leisure time on our hands. For the most part, we filled that time vacuum by watching television.

On January 19th, 1953, Lucille Ball went to the hospital on “I Love Lucy”. 44 million people tuned in to watch, 71.1% of all television households in America watched that show, with 20 million TV households. When Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan in 1956, 60 million people (82.6% of houses with a TV) sat down to watch. Truly mass media arrived in time to fill that leftover leisure time.

But today, something is changing.

Clay Shirky, a adjunct professor at NYU, stood up at the Web 2.0 conference last week and gave a speech entitled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.

He talks about the “cognitive surplus” that happens when societies change. In the 20th century that surplus was taken up by television. People are now moving away from TV and towards becoming an active part of communities online. When only a small amount of time is taken away from our collective TV watching, we can together create things like Wikipedia.

Read the article, an excellent and fascinating take on the changes going on around us.