The 21st century of glowing rectangles
I recently read an article that was a press release of a study that stated that most Americans spend 90% of their waking hours staring at glowing rectangles. Of course, I read this from my computer’s glowing rectangle. It didn’t surprise me. I spend a lot of time on my computer and have been baffled by the infinite potential of information to be gleamed from this glorious internet. So when I ran across Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I was immediately intrigued. Why not harness the time used in front of glowing rectangles for some money? Suddenly sitting at my computer became less of a time waster and more of a potential candy bar slowly being formulated one HIT at a time. I’ve recently been taking time out each day to get in a couple HITs and noticed how I forget exactly how many I did before I’m finished. I like this hazy ambiguity since it comes back to surprise me a few days later when my HITs start to pay up. As long as I keep a conveyor belt of hits going, I have a micro stream of money. I like to think of it as my conveyor belt of potential candy bars. I don’t really eat that many candy bars…but if there was a replacement currency of equivalent value for HITs, it would be candy. Even if the machine breaks down because I have plans come up, or I just forget about Turkin’, I still have some pocket change to put to use. It’s like finding coins under the couch cushion…but in the 21st century of glowing rectangles.
