This post is all about me. Just because.

In one of my jobs I spend a lot of time helping people learn new skills. I sit down with them, work out why they want to learn to do something (and that actually does matter!) and help them to work their way around a new idea or skill.

One problem that I often have as a teacher is that I make far too many assumptions. I try not to and I warn other people against the folly but I don’t always take my own advice.

Today I showed some teachers tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer (and Firefox).  Six teachers and not one of them knew about this feature that I take for granted and use every day. They were quite blown away by the idea but at the end of a session could see how this simple feature helped them accomplish the task at hand. So how did I learn about tabbed browsing? By accident probably – I always have lots of pages open and even in the early days (on slow, expensive dial up) can remember loading up several pages to read offline (and walking off to make coffee while the pages loaded!). Of course tabbed browsing has been a much touted feature of Opera and Firefox for years. So I can’t really remember!

So how do I find the time to read everything I read and learn everything that I do? I get asked that question almost daily. It all has to do with gin and TV shows.

Clay Shirky has written an interesting piece entitled Gin, Television and Social Surplus. He charts a course from the days when gin stupefied the masses through a period when the gin was joined by TV sitcoms.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

This is an interesting post that talks about the way that people are using what he terms, “a cognitive surplus”. Increasingly people are not content to merely sit back and wait for new TV shows to come to a screen near them.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

Now I can’t pretend that I never enjoy the odd glass of stupefying liquid (or the even ones) or that I never watch TV.  We don’t have Sky because we’d rather spend the money on faster broadband – and as much of it as we can. And every month that resource is well used as the members of this household tab their way through as many webpages as possible!

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