Television and The Cognitive Surplus
A few weeks back I finally pulled the plug on television. Since I don't own a television, this meant not visiting hulu.com any more. Since then I've noticed some extra time in my life that I'm not used to using, that has long been consumed by passive consumption.
Here Clay Shirky talks about the vast 'cognitive surplus' that our society has, the free time that we don't yet know what to do with and generally spend on things like television, and how social media like Wikipedia are beginning to tap into it.
My favorite stats from his talk: The entirety of Wikipedia represents about 100 million hours of human thought. Americans alone watch 200 BILLION hours of television per year. That's 200,000,000,000 hours. Or 2,000 Wikipedias per year.
If people spend 1% of that television time do something productive, that's 20 Wikipedias per year. And this year we're going to sprinkle in a WikiChoice.
(ht @gapingvoid)
Labels: Simplicity, Thoughts, wikichoice
posted by James at 00:01
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3 Comments:
Excellent post James, thanks for that video. Absolutely inspiring.
Cheers.
Now that Jared is gone, I would like to adopt his spot for Coke&Smoke.
I also want to see the new office space.
I love the punchline at the end. So excited to see what happens with WikiChoice!
Passive consumption is a great phrase. There are so many other things in my life that I can categorize under that umbrella. It's mind blowing to think what the world could do with only 1/10 of the time we waste watching television.
Great post.
So what have you filled your time with now that hulu is out of your life?
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