This link has been bookmarked by 327 people . It was first bookmarked on 26 Apr 2008, by isaac Mao.
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meanderinglara"I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into. But I'm not sure she believed me, in part because she didn't want to believe me, but also in part because I didn't have the right story
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jcurtis4082we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.
internet technology collaboration history web2.0 social future wikipedia 2010Delicious
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Tip NgIf 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--ri
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Chris Smith"(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)" Clay Shirky
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Aquila GarudaHere's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.
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gailwebbI was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
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I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
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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.
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I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"
I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. -
the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation
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, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.
I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into. But I'm not sure she believed me, in part because she didn't want to believe me, but also in part because I didn't have the right story yet. And now I do.
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
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Peggy Georgea lightly edited transcription of a speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008. Clay Shirk is the author of the frequently quoted book called Here Comes Everybody.
web2.0 shirky history TV media Internet culture social media clayshirky
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14 Sep 08
J. DunnShirky estimates that a 1-percent global change in behavior from TV-watching to participatory media would free up enough man-hours for 100 Wikipedia-scale projects each year.
culture culture.web culture.communication culture.commentary ideas.networks issues.digitaldivide issues.mediacrit politics politics.democracy politics.democracy.emergent web web.projects web.projects.localprogress issues.bowlingalone ideas.wonder ideas.sc
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jasonfbennettseriously, though.
productivity technology culture socialmedia web2.0 clayshirky collaboration creativity television media for:lilybenne
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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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that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.
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Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year
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put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads
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raman srinivasanyou got cognitive surplus?
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Sheryl A. McCoyvery profound commentary; describing today's cognitive surplus analagously to Industrial Revolution's people surplus.
ethics commentary cognitive surplus analogy Industrial Revolution collaboration internet communication Interactive web2.0 shirky TV media history culture Internet social
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Chris LasherClay Shirky on cognitive surplus and web 2.0's transformation of society.
internet culture media history future analysis collaboration community technology web presentation consumerism creativity social
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So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
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michelemmartinFor those wondering where we find the time for professional development
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Mark PesceClay's good. Got to give him that. But what happens to the cognitive surplus, well, heh, that's *my* particular bailiwick.
Shirky social socialmedia wikipedia creative crowdsourcing culture hyperintelligence anthropology knowledge internet trends tv future
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Ewan McIntoshCognitive surplus, which we've filled with TV, can now be filled with a little more interactive stuff - on the web
productivity collaboration blogging community history innovation opensource television technology statistics research presentations wiki for:sedgarlts
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Tim MannveilleClay Shirkon makes the case that until now social surplus has just been coped with rather than leveraged for good. If everyone watched 1% less television we could have 10,000 more wikipedia-scale collaborative projects.
Bookmarks clay shirkyon here comes everybody social surplus interaction tv television
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Javed Alam(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at
the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in
the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical
technology, -
07 May 08
E. Alana Jamesbook on how TV ws to the 50s what gin ws to the turn of the century a lubricant for stress under social change - and now????
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