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I
was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a
British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early
phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London.And
it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and
museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of
things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an
asset.It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a
vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just
dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an
industrial society. -
If
I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th
century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels
would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom.
Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things
happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment,
rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who
were working five-day work weeks. 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.
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 functioned as
a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might
otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. - 3 more annotations...
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I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I
should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you
seeing out there that's interesting?"I started telling her about the Wikipedia
article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the
planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of
this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people
are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit
at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the
while--from, "Pluto is the ninth
planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped
orbit at the edge of the solar system."So
I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to
have a conversation about authority or social construction or
whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and
she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?"
That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No
one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the
time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been
masking for 50 years."
So
how big is that surplus? 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. -
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 100 Wikipedia projects per year
worth of participation -
, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know,
sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but
then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good
as doing what I was doing before," and settle down. And
I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this
was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial
revolution than to flagpole-sitting.
I was arguing that this
isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing
that society grows into. But I'm not sure she believed me, in part
because she didn't want to believe me, but also in part because I
didn't have the right story yet. And now I do.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. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. 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.
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07 Dec 08
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21 Sep 08
Peggy Georgea lightly edited transcription of a speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008. Clay Shirk is the author of the frequently quoted book called Here Comes Everybody.
web2.0 shirky history TV media Internet culture social media clayshirky
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19 Sep 08
Yule HeibelTranscript of speech Shirky gave at April 23/08 Web2.0 conference. For me, ineresting to think about in relation to cities, and how industrialization created anxiety about and problems relating to crowding ("slums"). Now, "here comes *everybody*" means that there's another wave of "crowding" or ...crowds, and it's interesting to think about how this might play out.
clay_shirky history socialmedia socialcritique socialtheory web2.0
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The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London.And
it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and
museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of
things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an
asset.It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a
vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just
dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an
industrial society. -
The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London. - 1 more annotations...
-
-
The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London.And
it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and
museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of
things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an
asset.It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a
vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just
dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an
industrial society.
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25 Aug 08
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07 Aug 08
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British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of
the industrial revolution, was gin -
that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human
thought. - 2 more annotations...
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Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year
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put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend,
just watching the ads
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06 Aug 08
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raman srinivasanyou got cognitive surplus?
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05 Aug 08
Sheryl A. McCoyvery profound commentary; describing today's cognitive surplus analagously to Industrial Revolution's people surplus.
ethics commentary cognitive surplus analogy Industrial Revolution collaboration internet communication Interactive web2.0 shirky TV media history culture Internet social
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that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a
year spent watching television
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10 Jul 08
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09 Jun 08
Chris LasherClay Shirky on cognitive surplus and web 2.0's transformation of society.
internet culture media history future analysis collaboration community technology web presentation consumerism creativity social
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06 Jun 08
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So
I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to
have a conversation about authority or social construction or
whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and
she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?"
That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No
one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the
time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been
masking for 50 years."
So
how big is that surplus? 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.
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.
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03 Jun 08
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27 May 08
Brynn EvansThis is a short transcript of Clay Shirky's speech given at the Web 2.0 expo (2008).
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08 May 08
Javed Alam(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at
the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in
the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical
technology, -
07 May 08
E. Alana Jamesbook on how TV ws to the 50s what gin ws to the turn of the century a lubricant for stress under social change - and now????
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The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather
than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that
combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting
community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over
there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But
despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because
there's so much complexity.The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and
lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails
informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff
near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now. -
However lousy it is to sit in your
basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal
experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if
Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter. - 4 more annotations...
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And
I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do
something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute
pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute
captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you
see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play
this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change. -
This
is something that people in the media world don't understand. -
People like to consume, but they also like to
produce, and they like to share.And
what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the
previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do
something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer
people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on
that offer. -
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.
-
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So
how big is that surplus? 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.
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. -
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. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. 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.
-
-
30 Apr 08
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So
how big is that surplus? 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.
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.
-
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29 Apr 08
Janet TokerudClay Shirky Speech given at the San Francisco Web 2.0 Conference on April 23, 2008. Clay just published his book: Here Comes Everybody
Clay Shirky social media web2.0 TV shirky Wikipedia history Internet gin
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Rudy GarnsI started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years." (Clay shirkey) -
Michel BauwensHere'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.
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28 Apr 08
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So how big is that surplus? 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. 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.
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Lynette Webbgreat article that addresses the "how do they have time" question that is often people's responses when they first encounter the idea of people contributing stuff online
socialmedia web2.0 user-generated-content changing-behaviour media-future decline-of-traditional-media participatory-media
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didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an
asset. -
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.
- 6 more annotations...
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Wikipedia
exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100
million hours of human 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. -
The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and
lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails
informatively -
Media
in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How
much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more
and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has
generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three
different events. People like to consume, but they also like to
produce, and they like to share. -
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 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year
worth of participation. -
We're going to
look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user
has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a
canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little
bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we
make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.
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Graeme NicholasAbout cognitive surplus produced by innovation and how society takes time to discover what to do with the surplus.
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Vance StevensHere'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. Those are things that make me believe th
ClayShirky Shirky pp107tesol multiliteracies wikipedia socialmedia culture webheads webheadsinaction writingmatrix
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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. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. 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.
-
-
Lindsay DonagheGreat speech by Clay Shirky on the evolution of society from passive consumers to active producers and sharers. He terms it as how we handle our "cognitive surplus" of free time that's not spent supporting ourselves (work). Thought provoking.
web2.0 geekstuff interesting article collaboration communication
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27 Apr 08
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I started telling her about the Wikipedia
article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the
planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of
this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people
are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit
at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the
while--from, "Pluto is the ninth
planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped
orbit at the edge of the solar system."So
I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to
have a conversation about authority or social construction or
whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and
she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?"
That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No
one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the
time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been
masking for 50 years."
-
-
-
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. 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.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then 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. ...
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 -
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. 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.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then 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. ...
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
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