Seeker Blog

Charles told us about an interesting talk by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008. There’ s a transcript on Shirky’s site at Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Video of the talk at Blip.tv.

One way to look at the “cognitive surplus” is the 200 billion hours/year that Americans flush away on TV. Worldwide Shirky estimates “the Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year.”

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

One “Wikipedia unit” = 100 million hours = Shirky’s estimate of the total human effort invested in the Wikipedia content in all languages. So globally, if we could entice away just 1% of that wasted TV time, we would gain a cognitive surplus = 100 Wikipedia units/year of participation. About the mouse:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.