This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 02 Sep 2008, by Takuya Homma.
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02 Sep 08
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If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 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 98 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 98 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 the cognitive surplus that's finally being dragged into what Tim O'Reilly calls an architecture of participation.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first... Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
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I wonder if there isn't something similar happening in the church. For a good while now churches have been seen as religious vendors, giving people what they need spiritually, offering a form of entertainment that can be taken in passively, etc. But there are quite a few people that are realising that this has led to a sort of collective spiritual stupor. And when people come out of this stupor, what you find is people not wanting a passive, received religion, but a spirituality that they are a part of, or as the article says, an 'architecture of participation'. And this is ironic because this is exactly the same shift that needed to happen 2000 years ago - the shift from one priest to the 'priesthood of all believers'; the shift from a few select leaders to a plurality of 'gifts' making up the body as a whole.
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But, as the article also notes, these times of change aren't always straightforward. And I think we're seeing that in the church at large as well. We've so invested in a certain system, that we're not quite sure what any other system might look like. So the good news is that we all might get to be a part of something new. The bad news is that it might be a little messy. (And to be honest, in general I'm not a big fan of messy.)
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