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Mining the Cognitive Surplus

Posted by kdawson on from the looking-for-the-mouse dept.

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.

2 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Remember the good old days? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    When the President was busy nutting in Monica's mouth, then started a war with Yugoslavia to give us something to watch on TV besides himself being torn to shreds by his political enemies? How many gallons of ex-Presidential semen have young interns drank in the 8 years that he's been flying under the radar?

  2. IFailzo8s by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    OpenBSD leadEr theo