Yule Heibel's personal annotations on this page
Lampertina bookmarked
on 2008-09-19
Transcript 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.
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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. -
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.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.
This link has been bookmarked by 138 people . It was first bookmarked on 26 Apr 2008, by isaac Mao.
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Allison KiptaAnd 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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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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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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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.
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Yule Heibel
Transcript 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.
-
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...
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beaucoup SmithFree time activates "cognitive surplus" -- blogs, contributing to Wiki, etc.
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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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raman srinivasanyou got cognitive surplus?
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Sheryl A. McCoyvery profound commentary; describing today's cognitive surplus analagously to Industrial Revolution's people surplus.
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that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a
year spent watching television
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Chris LasherClay Shirky on cognitive surplus and web 2.0's transformation of society.
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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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Brynn EvansThis is a short transcript of Clay Shirky's speech given at the Web 2.0 expo (2008).
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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, -
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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Chris BetcherGreat post by Clay Shirky
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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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paul reidThe 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.
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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.
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Sean Dtaking advantage of the social surplus that was previously wasted on sitcoms
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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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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
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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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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
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Michael Statongood speech on web2.0
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Owen MathewsGreat take on what read/write culture means.
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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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Marc Ordinas i LlopisWe waste "2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television".
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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
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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.
-
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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.
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kevin glassclay shirky
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Doug NoonHere'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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