Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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. Parent post's mod must be a liberal... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    You can tell because they are more interested in stifling dissent than in answering the question.

  2. Re:Fascinating by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    My pokemans! Let me show you them!

    Which is the problem (or the feature) in a nutshell, and I'm glad at least one mod figured it out. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: "Here we are, cognitive surplus the size of a planet, and all the metaprogrammer asks us to do is to post LOLcats..."

    Someday, the metaprogrammer's gonna ask it to code up something different. Battletoads? :)