This link has been bookmarked by 67 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 Apr 2008, by Todd Suomela.
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02 Oct 09
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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. - 11 more annotations...
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cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a
crisis. -
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. -
And television
watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. -
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. -
The
early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
this
isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing
that society grows into. -
Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not
be worth sitting still for. -
We're looking for the mouse. 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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28 Sep 09
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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. -
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. - 4 more annotations...
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The normal case of
social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't
pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible -
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. -
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. -
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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22 Sep 09
Tarmo ToikkanenClay Shirky talks about TV watching, Wikipedia, and where all the time comes from, or goes to.
technology web2.0 future shirky sociology tv wikipedia surplus
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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. -
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. - 1 more annotations...
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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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15 Sep 09
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18 Jul 09
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Social Surplus
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24 Jun 09
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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." - 1 more annotations...
-
-
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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12 Jun 09
Donna BaumbachIf 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. - Clay Shirky
culture media internet television web2.0 social technology tv professional_development delicious_backup
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10 Jun 09
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23 May 09
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13 Apr 09
Nicholas SenskeAnd 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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18 Mar 09
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02 Jan 09
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So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer -
So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. - 5 more annotations...
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So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer -
So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer -
So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. -
So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. -
So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer.
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Mark SpahrThis post by Clay Shirky does a great job of describing the reasons behind the popularity of Web 2.0 applications and the paradigm shift they are bringing to our world. Thanks to Dean Shareski for the link.
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01 Nov 08
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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. -
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. - 1 more annotations...
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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 100 Wikipedia projects per year
worth of participation.
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15 Oct 08
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07 Oct 08
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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. -
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. We're seeing things being designed to take
advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement. - 2 more annotations...
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how big is that surplus?
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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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08 Sep 08
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28 Aug 08
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12 Aug 08
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11 Aug 08
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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. -
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." - 2 more annotations...
-
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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. -
And television
watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.
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01 Aug 08
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24 Jul 08
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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.
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21 Jul 08
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14 Jul 08
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04 Jul 08
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25 Jun 08
Jaakko H.Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shirky.com%2Fherecomeseverybody%2F2008%2F04%2Flooking-for-the-mouse.html
web2.0 media community collaboration internet social inspiration socialmedia sociology clay_shirky gin participation cognitive_surplus imported_from_delicious_2009-10-07
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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. -
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 - 22 more annotations...
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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. We're seeing things being designed to take
advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement. -
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. -
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." -
all of Wikipedia, the whole project--
-
order of magnitude
-
about 100 million hours of
thought. -
2,000 Wikipedia projects a
year spent watching television. -
in the
U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. -
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, -
an
architecture of participation. -
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 -
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 -
general principle. It's better to do
something than to do nothing. -
This
is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media
in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. -
the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she
was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me
was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" -
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'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. -
"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. -
From now on, that's what
I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. 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.
-
-
-
Jaakko HAnnotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shirky.com%2Fherecomeseverybody%2F2008%2F04%2Flooking-for-the-mouse.html
web2.0 media community collaboration internet social inspiration socialmedia sociology clay_shirky gin participation cognitive_surplus
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11 Jun 08
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09 Jun 08
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08 Jun 08
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04 Jun 08
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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."
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03 Jun 08
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01 Jun 08
M C MorganAnd 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. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engagi
socialnetworking economics socialpractices attention_economy
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29 May 08
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24 May 08
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23 May 08
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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.
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15 May 08
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14 May 08
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12 May 08
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11 May 08
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08 May 08
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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.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. We're seeing things being designed to take
advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement. -
Now,
this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street
corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be
careful there after dark." But it's something society knows
without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source
where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're
certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in
starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may
not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to
try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the
authorities who might have it now."Maybe
this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of
social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't
pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that
this one succeeds, obviously. 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 - 1 more annotations...
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So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath
that question was another thought, this one not a question but an
observation. In this same conversation
with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and
as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers.
Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."At least they're doing something.
Did
you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get
off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I
saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every
half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at
my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I
had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is
none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel
of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's
not, and that's the big surprise. 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.
-
-
-
07 May 08
-
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. -
It's better to do
something than to do nothing. - 1 more annotations...
-
-
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?"
-
-
-
Jeff UtechtHere'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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04 May 08
M McBrideAnd 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, th
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. 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 television
watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. - 7 more annotations...
-
-
we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.
-
Tim calls an
architecture of participation. -
It's better to do
something than to do nothing -
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. -
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." -
We're looking for the mouse
-
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.
-
-
-
03 May 08
-
Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as
a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might
otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. -
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. We're seeing things being designed to take
advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement. - 7 more annotations...
-
-
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. -
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. -
At least they're doing something.
Did
you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get
off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I
saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every
half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at
my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I
had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is
none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel
of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's
not, and that's the big surprise. 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. -
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. -
One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year
worth of participation. -
I think that's going to be a big deal.
Don't you?Well,
the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she
was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me
was essentially, "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.
-
-
-
02 May 08
-
-
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.
-
Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as
a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might
otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. - 12 more annotations...
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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. -
in the
U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads -
The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather
than it is like the physics of gravity. -
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. -
The normal case of
social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't
pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible -
So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" -
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. -
And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.
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when you offer
people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on
that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll
never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It
just means we'll do it less. -
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. -
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. -
"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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01 May 08
Stephen CarrShirky's transcript from his keynote at web2.0 2008
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glen gatinSo all that time I spent just watching Get Smart didn't help my Cognitive account. Does it count if I can still recite all the best lines? So your Mr.Big... So your Mr. Smart.
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Did
you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get
off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I
saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every
half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at
my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I
had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is
none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel
of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's
not, and that's the big surprise. 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. -
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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30 Apr 08
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FruFru FourOneAnnotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shirky.com%2Fherecomeseverybody%2F2008%2F04%2Flooking-for-the-mouse.html
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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. -
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
- 1 more annotations...
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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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29 Apr 08
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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 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year
worth of participation.I think that's going to be a big deal.
Don't you? -
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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