Mining the Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky has been giving talks on his book Here Comes Everybody — his "masterpiece," per Cory Doctorow — and BoingBoing picks up one of them, from the Web 2.0 conference. Shirky has come up with a quantification of the attention that TV has been absorbing for more than half a century. Shirky defines as a unit of attention "the Wikipedia": 100 million person-hours of thought. As a society we have been burning 2,000 Wikipedias per year watching mostly sitcoms. We're stopping now. Here's a video of another information-dense Shirky talk, this one at Harvard.

Re:"the Wikipedia"? no

[Workaphobia]

No, no, a Library of Congress is a measurement of information quantity, and a Wikipedia is a measurement of attention; the dimensions are not equal at all.

However, 1e8 person * hours is an incredibly bad choice for the definition of a Wikipedia. Why not make it more metric, defining it to be something like 1 person * second of attention? Then the SI standard unit would be a megawikipedia, or MWp. This is equivalent to one person studying something for one and a half weeks, or all of America witnessing an event that lasts a third of a second.

Re:Interesting Analysis

[1 a bee]

He argues in the article even a 1% drop of TV viewing hours redirected to collaborative output (multiplayer online games, forum discussions, such as this one, all count as *output*) can have transformative societal effects (about 1000 wikipedias / yr, if I read that correctly). So even a small shift away from pure couch potato consumption, to collaborative production (remember the online multiplayer game isn't worth a damn without the other players), he claims, represents a huge shift in societal output. And if this collaborative production thing actually snowballs, then the 1% estimate will seem a bit too tame..