Today I came across this fascinating talk on the idea of our society’s “cognitive surplus” by a thinker named Clay Shirky. Here’s one of the many interesting tidbits from his presentation:
So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
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.
If you have 15 minutes to spare (you’ll get the joke if you watch the video), take a look at it and tell me what you think:
One comment
Wow. I’m way behind (as usual) on our cultural landscape, and can hardly believe this NYU prof and I live in the same time slice, but very grateful to you for putting this out there for us to think about.
Kind of blew my mind, mostly because I usually don’t think of myself as having surplus cognitive time or resources, but he showed that we do. We all do. And the hours I blow off passively on TV are not justifiable as recreation, because the interactive/participatory is so much more fruitful.
I particularly dig his point that this “mouse-driven shift” is not a fad, but a cultural shift of magnitude and order of the industrial revolution.
Thanks, so much, for putting it up here, to shake and shock my brain into awakeness . . . sort of.