#BigHistory @TheEconomist on Gangnam Style and Productivity
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Often giving students a good idea of the size and scope of historical events can be difficult.
The Economist has a lovely graphic today that equates the number of man hours used ("wasted"?) in watching the music video Gangnam Style on YouTube to the man hours required to build various historical structures like Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid, or Burj Khalifa. Hopefully for many, it will put into high relief something from their daily lives in comparison with societies and cultures far distant in time from their own while also exercising some critical reasoning skills.
The Economist usually has some interesting daily charts that can be interesting to take apart and ask additional questions about. For instance on this one, how might man hours translate into direct cost across each of these disparate time periods? What does this say about the freedoms different societies either enjoyed or didn't? What might this indicate about the "next" potential threshold we reach? Are we possibly not getting to it as quickly as we otherwise might because of base entertainment?
On a smaller time scale, what is the equivalent if an individual student gave up something in their life (texting, video games, television) and instead spent it on something else (studying, for example)? How could one calculate the amount of time it takes to get a Ph.D., for example, and convert that into video gaming time? If one then gave up videogaming, how many Ph.D.s could one earn?