Edge has a talk by Clay Shirky about the cognitive surplus masked by our global culture's television viewing, entitled GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS.The thesis in a nutshell is this: at the start of the Industrial Revolution in England, the population was so overwhelmed by the changes coming about that they went on a collective bender, with gin as the beverage of choice. It was only when this collective unconsciousness ended that the true social benefits of the Industrial Revolution - public education, publicly accessible museums, public libraries, and so on.
Our culture has undergone a similar phenomenon, only our revolution is the Information Revolution and drug of choice since the 1950's has been television. Information technologies began generating surplus wealth (and free time) beginning in the mid 20th Century. The changes taking place were radical, as visionaries like Marshall McLuhan recognized, and rather than succumb to the confusion and anxiety that radical change induces, we immersed ourselves in the emerging world of mass multimedia entertainment. In other words, we watched a lot of I Love Lucy, Gilligan's Island, Hill Street Blues, afternoon soap operas, and MTV.
We have begun waking up from our TV oblivion, freeing up a fraction of what Shirky calls the "cognitive surplus" that was soaked up by TV. One of the key signs of this wakeup is the emergence of projects like Wikipedia. Shirky (with help from an IBM scientist) estimates that Wikipedia in its entirety represents roughly 100 million hours of human effort. Where do we find the time for such altruistic cognitive endeavors? We find it through a trivial reduction in the number of hours of television watched.
...the cognitive surplus ... [is] 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 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. [italics added]
This page has an introductory piece by Tim O'Reilly which would be worth the read all by itself. In the food for thought category, Shirky and O'Reilly together set out a virtual banquet in this fairly lengthy op ed page.
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