This link has been bookmarked by 32 people . It was first bookmarked on 31 Aug 2008, by someone privately.
-
29 Feb 12
-
06 Jun 11
-
22 Oct 10
-
10 May 10
Giorgio BertiniAccording to Shirky:Starting after the second world war, a whole host of factors, like rising GDP, rising educational attainment, and rising life-span, forced the industrialized world to grapple with something new: free time. Lots and lots of free time. T
-
07 Oct 09
Jaakko Hellerantayet-another posting about Shirky's "social surplus" talk. A good one.
looking_for_a_mouse social_surplus clayshirky shirky gin television wikipedia here_comes_everybody my_recommendations excellent speech presentation future web2.0 society2.0 open_society avoinyhteiskunta mega_trends
-
22 Jun 09
-
05 Jun 09
-
We constantly retell the story of the past as seen through the lens of the present, and only sometimes are the changes profound enough to require a complete repudiation of what went before.
-
-
03 Nov 08
jose muriloFor the first time in its history, young people are watching less TV than their elders, and the cause of the decline is competition for their free time from media that allow for active and social participation, not just passive and individual consumption.
The value in media is no longer in sources but in flows; when we pool our cognitive surplus, it creates value that doesn't exist when we operate in isolation. The displacement of TV watching is coming among people who are using more of their time to make things and do things, sometimes alone and sometimes together, and to share those things with others.internet web2.0 media culture web video business socialsoftware socialnetworking ecodigital ecognitive
-
19 Oct 08
-
26 Sep 08
-
23 Sep 08
linkmess"we can take advantage of our cognitive surplus, but only if we start regarding pure consumption as an anomaly, and broad participation as the norm. This not a dispassionate argument, because the stakes are so high. We don't get to decide whether we want
-
18 Sep 08
icytoplots of loose ends, but I like the estimate of TV vs Wikipedia
hours (Wikipedia could be done from scratch in the time the population
of the US spent watching TV ads on the weekend)web technology media society internet tv television cognitive surplus ideas gin industrialisation
-
15 Sep 08
-
12 Sep 08
-
-
Social software has arrived, and if you don't pay attention and take onboard the developments at Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc., you are opting out of being a serious player in the realm of 21st Century ideas.
-
Starting after the second world war, a whole host of factors, like rising GDP, rising educational attainment, and rising life-span, forced the industrialized world to grapple with something new: free time. Lots and lots of free time. The amount of unstructured time among the educated population ballooned, accounting for billions of hours a year. And what did we do with that time? Mostly, we watched TV.
-
Shirky believes that "we can take advantage of our cognitive surplus, but only if we start regarding pure consumption as an anomaly, and broad participation as the norm.
-
This is not to say that the idea of the social graph as the next big thing invalidates the other insights I was working with. Instead, it clarifies and expands them:
-
The social graph is only one instance of a class of data structure that will prove increasingly important as we build applications powered by data at internet scale. You can think of the mapping of people, businesses, and events to places as the "location graph", or the relationship of search queries to results and advertisements as the "question-answer graph."
-
Both Clay, who thought then that "social software" was a meaningful metaphor and I, who found it less useful then than I do today, have changed our minds. A concept is a frame, an organizing principle, a tool that helps us see. It seems to me that we all change our minds every day through the accretion of new facts, new ideas, new circumstances. We constantly retell the story of the past as seen through the lens of the present, and only sometimes are the changes profound enough to require a complete repudiation of what went before.
-
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.
-
-
07 Sep 08
-
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
-
-
31 Aug 08
Rotem HermonAnd this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
-
The social graph is only one instance of a class of data structure that will prove increasingly important as we build applications powered by data at internet scale. You can think of the mapping of people, businesses, and events to places as the "location graph", or the relationship of search queries to results and advertisements as the "question-answer graph."
The graph exists outside of any particular application; multiple applications may explore and expose parts of it, gradually building a model of relationships that exist in the real world. -
For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
-
And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis
-
So how big is that surplus? 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.
-
But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.
-
And that's message—I can do that, too—is a big change.
-
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
-
Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
-
-
27 Aug 08
Howard RheingoldThe value in media is no longer in sources but in flows; when we pool our cognitive surplus, it creates value that doesn't exist when we operate in isolation. The displacement of TV watching is coming among people who are using more of their time to make
-
The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption.
-
Social software has arrived, and if you don't pay attention and take onboard the developments at Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc., you are opting out of being a serious player in the realm of 21st Century ideas.
-
In his piece (below), O'Reilly writes about his initial skepticism regarding Clay Shirky's 2002 vision of "social software".
-
Now, though, for the first time in its history, young people are watching less TV than their elders, and the cause of the decline is competition for their free time from media that allow for active and social participation, not just passive and individual consumption.
-
The value in media is no longer in sources but in flows; when we pool our cognitive surplus, it creates value that doesn't exist when we operate in isolation
-
Shirky believes that "we can take advantage of our cognitive surplus, but only if we start regarding pure consumption as an anomaly, and broad participation as the norm.
-
the change in the social landscape is altering institutions that have been stable for generations, and making possible new kinds of human engagement that have never existed before.
-
-
24 Aug 08
-
22 Aug 08
Ruth ParlinAnd what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially f
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.