I read a fantastic post yesterday, by Clay Shirky, author of Here comes everybody. It wasn't new - it was the transcript of a speech he delivered a year ago, viewable on YouTube (thanks to Martha Leyton for sending me the link). But I found his central idea fascinating.
There's a common reaction from people who don't spend their time on the internet, creating stuff, having conversations, playing games , posting videos, writing blogs or contributing to wikis. It's 'where do these people find the time?' (usually said in a way that implies 'sad people with no life').
Shirky's answer is 'by not watching TV'. By way of example, he's worked out that the total time required to create, code and write the whole of Wikipedia, in all its languages, has taken about 100 million hours. As opposed to TV watching - "two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.' In other words, the time spent on participating in social media is a tiny fraction of time spent passively watching TV, much of it soaps and adverts. He calls this the 'cognitive surplus' - the time and energy we waste on consuming and don't spend creating, sharing and doing.
Shirky claims that if we were to watch just 1% less TV than we are currently, that alone would be the equivalent of 100 more wikipedia projects each year. For me that's mind-blowing. As is his story of the 4-year-old looking for the mouse that went with the TV. Go read the article or watch the video and you'll see what I mean.
Photo credit: NMeM – Hulton Getty
