Table of Contents
ALSO BY CLAY SHIRKY
Here Comes Everybody:
The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
For Red Burns
Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus
In the 1720s, London was busy getting drunk. Really drunk. The city was in the grips of a gin-drinking binge, largely driven by new arrivals from the countryside in search of work. The characteristics of gin were attractive: fermented with grain that could be bought locally, packing a kick greater than that of beer, and considerably less expensive than imported wine, gin became a kind of anesthetic for the burgeoning population enduring profound new stresses of urban life. These stresses generated new behaviors, including what came to be called the Gin Craze.
Gin pushcarts plied the streets of London; if you couldnt afford a whole glass, you could buy a gin-soaked rag, and flop-houses did brisk business renting straw pallets by the hour if you needed to sleep off the effects. It was a kind of social lubricant for people suddenly tipped into an unfamiliar and often unforgiving life, keeping them from completely falling apart. Gin offered its consumers the ability to fall apart a little bit at a time. It was a collective bender, at civic scale.
The Gin Craze was a real eventgin consumption rose dramatically in the early 1700s, even as consumption of beer and wine remained flat. It was also a change in perception. Englands wealthy and titled were increasingly alarmed by what they saw in the streets of London. The population was growing at a historically unprecedented rate, with predictable effects on living conditions and public health, and crime of all sorts was on the rise. Especially upsetting was that the women of London had taken to drinking gin, often gathering in mixed-sex gin halls, proof positive of its corrosive effects on social norms.
It isnt hard to figure out why people were drinking gin. It is palatable and intoxicating, a winning combination, especially when a chaotic world can make sobriety seem overrated. Gin drinking provided a coping mechanism for people suddenly thrown together in the early decades of the industrial age, making it an urban phenomenon, especially concentrated in London. London was the site of the biggest influx of population as a result of industrialization. From the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s, the population of London grew two and a half times as fast as the overall population of England; by 1750, one English citizen in ten lived there, up from one in twenty-five a century earlier.
Industrialization didnt just create new ways of working, it created new ways of living, because the relocation of the population destroyed ancient habits common to country living, while drawing so many people together that the new density of the population broke the older urban models as well. In an attempt to restore Londons preindustrial norms, Parliament seized on gin. Starting in the late 1720s, and continuing over the next three decades, it passed law after law prohibiting various aspects of gins production, consumption, or sale. This strategy was ineffective, to put it mildly. The result was instead a thirty-year cat-and-mouse game of legislation to prevent gin consumption, followed by the rapid invention of ways to defeat those laws. Parliament outlawed flavored spirits; so distillers stopped adding juniper berries to the liquor. Selling gin was made illegal; women sold from bottles hidden beneath their skirts, and some entrepreneurial types created the puss and mew, a cabinet set on the streets where a customer could approach and, if they knew the password, hand their money to the vendor hidden inside and receive a dram of gin in return.
What made the craze subside wasnt any set of laws. Gin consumption was treated as the problem to be solved, when it fact it was a reaction to the real problemdramatic social change and the inability of older civic models to adapt. What helped the Gin Craze subside was the restructuring of society around the new urban realities created by Londons incredible social density, a restructuring that turned London into what wed recognize as a modern city, one of the first. Many of the institutions we mean when we talk about the industrialized world actually arose in response to the social climate created by industrialization, rather than to industrialization itself. Mutual aid societies provided shared management of risk outside the traditional ties of kin and church. The spread of coffeehouses and later restaurants was spurred by concentrated populations. Political parties began to recruit the urban poor and to field candidates more responsive to them. These changes came about only when civic density stopped being treated as a crisis and started being treated as a simple fact, even an opportunity. Gin consumption, driven upward in part by people anesthetizing themselves against the horrors of city life, started falling, in part because the new social structures mitigated these horrors. The increase in both population and aggregate wealth made it possible to invent new kinds of institutions; instead of madding crowds, the architects of the new society saw a civic surplus, created as a side effect of industrialization.
And what of us? What of our historical generation? That section of the global population we still sometimes refer to as the industrialized world has actually been transitioning to a postindustrial form for some time. The postwar trends of emptying rural populations, urban growth, and increased suburban density, accompanied by rising educational attainment across almost all demographic groups, have marked a huge increase in the number of people paid to think or talk, rather than to produce or transport objects. During this transition, what has been our gin, the critical lubricant that eased our transition from one kind of society to another?
The sitcom. Watching sitcomsand soap operas, costume dramas, and the host of other amusements offered by TVhas absorbed the lions share of the free time available to the citizens of the developed world.
Since the Second World War, increases in GDP, educational attainment, and life span have forced the industrialized world to grapple with something wed never had to deal with on a national scale: free time. The amount of unstructured time cumulatively available to the educated population ballooned, both because the educated population itself ballooned, and because that population was living longer while working less. (Segments of the population experienced an upsurge of education and free time before the 1940s, but they tended to be in urban enclaves, and the Great Depression reversed many of the existing trends for both schooling and time off from work.) This change was accompanied by a weakening of traditional uses of that free time as a result of suburbanizationmoving out of cities and living far from neighborsand of periodic relocation as people moved for jobs. The cumulative free time in the postwar United States began to add up to billions of collective hours per year, even as picnics and bowling leagues faded into the past. So what did we do with all that time? Mostly, we watched TV.
We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligans Island. We watched Malcolm in the Middle. We watched Desperate Housewives . We had so much free time to burn and so few other appealing ways to burn it that every citizen in the developed world took to watching television as if it were a duty. TV quickly took up the largest chunk of our free time: an average of over twenty hours a week, worldwide. In the history of media, only radio has been as omnipresent, and much radio listening accompanies other activities, like work or travel. For most people most of the time, watching TV
