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He figures all of Wikipedia, his gold standard for group activity online, took about 100 million hours of thought to produce. So Americans could build 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year just by writing articles instead of watching television.

Those new activities—and he gives plenty of examples in the book of projects already under way—could center on charity, civic engagement, coping with diseases, and more.

He points out that in the several decades immediately following Gutenberg's first Bible, not much really changed in European information society. Much later, some world-changing ideas came along on how to use the printing press, like the Invisible College.

"The problem with alchemy wasn't that the alchemists had failed to turn lead into gold—no one could do that. The problem, rather, was that the alchemists had failed uninformatively."

"Even when working with the same tools, they were working in a far different, and better, culture of communication."

Today's open-source software and the hypersharing of social networks represent a new, better order. And we're only starting to see the impact of those inventions.

Essentially, says Danah Boyd, a researcher for Microsoft Research and a longtime friend, Shirky thinks Karl Marx got it wrong. While critics like Slee may read any online social participation as economic exploitation, Shirky argues that people are motivated by love, not money. She points to Wikipedia: "People contribute because they enjoy the process," she says. Or academe. "Are we doing it for the pay?" "There's a lot of labor of love. People like being a part of cultural production on every level."

Shirky got the job at NYU because of a talk he gave at a technology conference in the late 1990s, while he was working as a freelance computer programmer and Web designer. T

Drawn to the classroom, he approached Yale in 1995 about teaching a class there on online social groups. Though students there backed the idea, he says, a university committee turned him down. "They killed it because they said it doesn't really make sense to talk about community online because those people aren't really meeting each other," he says.