200 billion hours

Clay Shirky has posted a marvelous comparison of the time people devote to watching television to the time people devote to Wikipedia. Television is a stunning amount of our collective downtime, 200,000,000,000 hours every year just in the United States. 200 billion hours. Next time someone asks where we’ll find the time to do something, hide their remote control.

We could translate 200 billion hours of television into all sorts of measures. Television is a huge percentage of our electrical consumption, and hence a huge percentage of our CO2 output, our mercury pollution from power plants, our strip mining and nuclear waste generation, and our household budgets. 200 billion hours of television is a displacement of other modes of media and entertainment, a successful approach to social control, and an insanely effective propaganda tool. But the biggest cost may be the opportunity cost, which is the hardest cost to quantify. What could we do with 200 billion hours? On a personal level, what could you do with an extra 500 or 1000 hours per year? What could you do if you reclaimed half of your workday?