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.

Comments

good missed points

[opencity]

Jerry Mander's book from the 70s made a crucial distinction between active and passive media. The above slashdot comments seem limited to wikipedia bashing or a splitting of web 2.0 hairs re:2008. That is, the percentage that are coherent, which is low by the usually high standards of non technical commentary on this site ... cough ...

This reminded me of seeing Esther Dyson and some pundits on Charley Rose a couple of years ago. They all laughed when Dyson said: "I can't tell you what web 2.0 means". Web 2.04 (or wherever we're at) means everyone can be Esther Dyson, everyone can be Charley Rose. Not everyone can be Tom Friedman as it takes years to acquire the ego involved in that much stupidity. Now is everyone going to be Charley Rose? No. Will there still be old school one way media? Yes, at least for a long time.

Mander's point is that TV is passive and active participation works the brain muscles more than then passive staring at the screen. The brain is a muscle, use it or lose it. As someone who quit TV, not unlike drugs, in my teen years I've long argued that TV was the reason for the collapse of literacy in the US. Will the wide open web cure that? Probably not, we shall see, but any change is good. American pop culture, mainstream corporate entertainment, now resembles a piece of chewing gum so worked over there is no flavor left (see: pop music). Are endless sectarian/technical blog exchanges entertaining? YMMV, but compared to what's on TV and the radio they at least measure up.