Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody - The Diigo Meta page

• 02 Oct 09
  

  Jeffrey Wear

  Re-deploying the cognitive surplus currently spent on non-participatory pursuits like TV to producing and sharing media could transform society.
  
  1% of the time currently spent watching TV in the US per year could build 100-Wikipedia like projects.

  future culture media speech social

  • 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...
  • • 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.

      
      

• 28 Sep 09
  

  Ed Webb

  technology web2.0 shirky Culture future Media sociology history connectiveknowledge crowdsourcing networks

  • 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...
  • • 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.
• 

  Neill Milton

  Clay Shirkey organization

• 22 Sep 09
  

  Tarmo Toikkanen

  Clay 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

  • 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...
  • • 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.
• 15 Sep 09
  

  Hamish Macleod

  clay.shirky cognitive.surplus technology

• 18 Jul 09
  

  Todd Finley

  shirky technology future Culture Media

  • Social Surplus
• 24 Jun 09
  

  Sheri Edwards

  technology web2.0 future sociology Culture shirky history Media

  • 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.
• 12 Jun 09
  

  Donna Baumbach

  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. - Clay Shirky

  culture media internet television web2.0 social technology tv professional_development delicious_backup

• 10 Jun 09
  

  Brenda Muench

  technology web2.0 interesting article

• 23 May 09
  

  Renee Callahan
• 13 Apr 09
  

  Nicholas Senske

  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.

  shirky pbs

• 18 Mar 09
  

  Andrew Wetzel

  Digirati Here Comes Everybody | Clay Shirkey

• 02 Jan 09
  

  Maureen Tumenas

  Shirky culture

  • 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...
  • • 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.
• 

  Mark Spahr

  This 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.

  ClayShirky Blog Web2.0 CognitiveSurplus

• 01 Nov 08
  

  lucite

  community web2.0

  • 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...
  • • 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.
• 15 Oct 08
  

  chris Jangelov

  future web2.0 media everybody krevad

• 07 Oct 08
  

  Michael Dila
  • 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...
  • • how big is that surplus?
    • 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.
• 08 Sep 08
  

  Ed H Chi

  cognition participation wikipedia tv culture sociology

• 28 Aug 08
  

  Elliott Huntsman

  tech culture blog

• 12 Aug 08
  

  marc sobel
• 11 Aug 08
  

  Gerhard Stoltz
  • 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...
  • • 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.
• 01 Aug 08
  

  Susan Gill

  Clay Shirky on cognitive surplus: "looking for the mouse"

  technology future media

• 24 Jul 08
  

  mfyoon s
  • 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.
• 21 Jul 08
  

  Richard Davis

  web2.0 computing web history media blog

• 14 Jul 08
  

  Stephen Harlow

  ClayShirky Participatory Media Television Wikipedia WebMedia

• 04 Jul 08
  

  Deborah Fitchett

  toshare web2.0 wikipedia creativecommons

• 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

  • 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...
  • • 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 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

• 11 Jun 08
  

  Josie Fraser

  clay_shirky culture internet society citizenship collaboration community innovation games future education institutions social_engagement social_networking_sevices

• 09 Jun 08
  

  Shaun Creighton

  technology shirky future web2.0 media cognitive surplus

• 08 Jun 08
  

  Tom Sepp
• 04 Jun 08
  

  jim turner

  economic simulations

  • 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."
• 03 Jun 08
  

  Ms. Rowley

  blog collaboration creativity television society clayshirky socialnetworking internet

• 01 Jun 08
  

  M C Morgan

  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 engagi

  socialnetworking economics socialpractices attention_economy

• 

  Anand Thakker

  technology history media web2.0 technology everyday social

• 

  Jabiz Raisdana

  activism collaboration community culture media clayshirky

• 

  Jonathan Holt

  anthropology cool culture television society web2.0 art

• 29 May 08
  

  Eddie Osh

  sociology

• 24 May 08
  

  Shelley K.

  digital citizenship

• 23 May 08
  

  Stephanie Booth

  technology media tv history sociology internet digitalculture

  • 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.
• 

  Adriana Lukas

  clayshirky gin TV cognitive web socialweb media participation delicious

• 15 May 08
  

  Anne McKague

  one more thing recommended by David Warlick

  culture media television

• 14 May 08
  

  nori murphy
• 12 May 08
  

  Chuck Brands
• 

  Andrew Nachison
• 11 May 08
  

  Mark Dyck

  WOW! Really good article on participating rather than consuming, and the potential therein.

  clayshirky internet society social culture

• 

  Ethan Jewett

  technology sociology shirky future history collaboration attention interesting inspiration

• 08 May 08
  

  Clay Burell

  technology future history shirky sociology web2.0

  • 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...

  • • 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
  

  susan carter morgan

  technology future shirky

  • 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?"
• 

  Lisa Linn

  technology sociology future history

• 

  Jeff Utecht

  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.

  technology shirky sociology

• 04 May 08
  

  M McBride

  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, th

  commons community sharing shirky manytomany future

• 

  Mario A Núñez

  technology shirky

  • . 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
  

  Adam Bohannon

  clayshirky technology sociology

  • 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.

• 

  Spiro Bolos

  2008 blog development history education tv social psychology sociology presentation

• 02 May 08
  

  Rob Crowther

  BlogPost Culture Essay Media Community

• 

  Jan Gondol

  trends

  • 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...

  • • 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.
    • 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.
• 01 May 08
  

  Stephen Carr

  Shirky's transcript from his keynote at web2.0 2008

  shirky web2.0 transcript talk keynote

• 

  glen gatin

  So 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.

  collectiveintelligence cognitivesurplus multimedia msm

  • 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.
    
    

• 

  josefin piggelin

  Culture future

• 30 Apr 08
  

  Hilco Blok

  procrastination technology sociology psychology history development creativity tv

• 

  FruFru FourOne

  Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shirky.com%2Fherecomeseverybody%2F2008%2F04%2Flooking-for-the-mouse.html

• 
  • 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...
  • • 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.
• 29 Apr 08
  

  Todd Suomela

  media criticism media-studies peer-production commons wikipedia future

  • 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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