This link has been bookmarked by 243 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 Apr 2008, by Todd Suomela.
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B.L. OchmanRe. Social Media. Clay Shirky's must-read blog post. Stunning. http://tinyurl.com/4oqfvc
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richtbreak"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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Marianne RiisHere Comes Everybody
culture media internet web2.0 social technology community collaboration clayshirky
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17 Jun 10
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British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
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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.
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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.
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And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
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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.
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d, "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."
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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.
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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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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?
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Giorgio Bertini(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, fo
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04 Apr 10
Jimmy BaikoviciusFor 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.
"Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I saiarticle future history socialmedia sociology technology television trends tv collaboration culture ikatu_interesting
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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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"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 hou
clayshirky culture media internet society television cognition heatsink sitcoms
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doug cornelius(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)
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Christopher AllenTRANSCRIPT: "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."
participation parcipatory social media network theory collaboration web2.0 clayshirky bgimgt566sx bgimgt preelluminate5 week5 required
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having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
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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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cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis.
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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.
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And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.
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It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
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The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into.
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Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.
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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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29 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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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17 Sep 09
Peter BeaumontI was thinking a while back about what we could achieve if we could move people from an activity like watching TV to one which builds something. If 10 million people watch an hour long TV program every week, that's 500 million hours a week, and at minimum
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Social Surplus
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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.
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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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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
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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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Adam J.My first inclination was to think of this not as a "cognitive surplus" but as the opposite: a kind of somatic limitation. Not an excess but a lower limit to what can be extracted before the subject opts out or destructs. And to think of gin and sitcoms
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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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26 Dec 08
Chris WaiglClay Shirky's April 2008 Web 2.0 talk transcript. Keyword: "cognitive surplus". Very thought-provoking.
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sandra rogersGin, Television, and Social Surplus
By
Clay Shirky
on April 26, 2008 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)
I was recently reminded ofwikipedia media technology social 2010_12_16_delicious_import
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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.
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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.
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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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16 Oct 08
Christian KreutzTwo 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.
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15 Oct 08
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14 Oct 08
pedro_daltroThe 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
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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.
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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.
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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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theothergretchen"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 moreweb blog history culture technology media community analysis social article television author
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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.
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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."
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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.
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And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.
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10 Aug 08
Ron MecredyLets look for the mouse - I found this in one of Andy's bookmarks.
McAfee enterprise2.0 collaboration share produce consume shirky
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Alberto CotticaDiscorso intrigante di Shirky: il surplus cognitivo che la settimana lavorativa di 8 ore ha generato è enorme - 100 milioni di ore SOLO NEGLI USA, OGNI FINE SETTIMANA E SOLO PER GUARDARE LA PUBBLICITA'. Ecco dove trovare il tempo per stare in internet!
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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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