Redeploying the Earth's Cognitive Surplus - Clay Shirky

Here's 15 minutes of the brilliant Clay Shirky putting the present day in perspective for you. He centers on what to do with all your extra time to make it both valuable and transformative. What free time? How quickly we forget what life was like less than 200 years ago -- or 50 years ago for that matter.

The vast amounts of free time that began with the Industrial Revolution and expanded until the present day are what Shirky calls "the cognitive surplus." We spent most of this surplus in the 20th century watching television. The rise of the web, Shirky notes, gives us the chance to redeploy some of this surplus from passive consumption to the actual absorbing, producing and sharing other things -- from one to many to many to many to one and back again; producing things from the banal to the sublime.

As Shirky puts it,

So how big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 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 98 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 98 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 the cognitive surplus that's finally being dragged into what Tim O'Reilly calls an architecture of participation.

Via Kevin Kelly's Conceptual Trends and Current Topics

Full transcript from Edge 255

Posted by Vanderleun at August 21, 2008 5:42 PM