Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008: Clay Shirky | Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus - 0 views
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Amanda French on 23 Sep 13Here's a tremendously engaging video of Clay Shirky giving the talk I just linked to about where people find the time to edit Wikipedia -- he thinks they probably stop watching TV. Which do you think is more productive? Another great quote from this piece: "So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought. And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television."