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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.
Let's just suppose he is right; we just get rid of TV. Now what? He acts like removing TV will cause all the time that was devoted to it to be channeled into more productive things, like Wikipedia. Which isn't even to say society would benefit from that at all. Do we really even want the legions of people with IQ 100 to have more time on their hands? Which isn't to say slow people don't have value, but they aren't really capable of advancing society much.
Besides, TV _is_ dieing. But it's being replaced by gossip blogs and video games. Things like WoW eat more hours than TV, and the people wasting time on them are usually the ones that could make valuable contributions to things like Wikipedia and FOSS.
So let's then take away TV, games, YouTube, blogs, and all that stuff. And what will people do with their extra time? Drink gin. These people aren't wasting time because of TV; they're wasting it because they _want_ to. And taking away their 'fun' will simply cause them to waste time some other way.
Mining? Surplus? Resources? To hell with that.
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