05/03/2008
Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo in SF talking about, among other things, the “cognitive surplus” we are only beginning to make use of.
He had a great response to a TV producer that heard a story about Wikipedians dealing with Pluto’s loss of “planet status” a couple years ago and who wondered where they “find the time” (that story starts at 03:45):
“No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
Some interesting statistics he states:
- The Internet-connected population watches 1 trillion hours of TV a year
- In the US, we watch 200 billion hours of TV a year
- Wikipedia represents roughly 100 million hours of work
- In the US, we watch 100 million hours of advertisements every weekend
Video posted at 17:02