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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.

5 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by NIckGorton · · Score: 2, Funny

    Just wow.

    My hippy-social-justice-queer-tree-hugging-dirt-worshipper self just did a little dance.

  2. Re:Fascinating by lunaticLT · · Score: 1, Funny

    My pokemans! Let me show you them!

  3. Re:Nope. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I'm lurking 5 IRCs, checking some IMs, and got a dozen tabs open... Oh! And there's this really funny thing on YouTube! And I just saw that someone texted me. But I feel that I forgot something. Now what was that thing I was actually supposed to be doing?

  4. Re:Tried it already by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Yeh, just imagine all the gold-collecting and powerlevelling you could do in WoW if those pesky consoles weren't around.

  5. Re:Fascinating by vlad30 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Improving the quality of TV is like improving the quality of shit...at the end of the day it's still shit. yes but Good Shit (TM) will make things grow. Bad Shit (TM) just poisons the earth and eventually kills everything it touches
    --
    Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you