April 29, 2008

Architecture of Participation Taps into "Cognitive Surplus"

Clay Shirky, author of the recently released book Here Comes Everybody, gave a wonderful talk at Web 2.0 conference on April 23, 2008.

Shirky basically asserts that we are finally realizing that we can do something with the "cognitive surplus" time that has been spent in non-participatory activities like watching TV. Using a back-of-the-envelope calculation, he shows that:

wikipedia = 100 million hours of thought

2 hundred billion hours watching TV (USA) = 2000 wikipedias per year




Clay has also posted a transcript of his talk, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.

I pointed out a couple of items from Clay's book that struck home with me in my Brain Food Week 2: Organizing, Getting Rich and Three Reasons to Laugh.

Thanks to Connie Cosby for pointing out this presentation.

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Comments:
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Kate
http://educationonline-101.com
# posted by Blogger eamon : 8:32 AM
 
Thanks for your article. I like the movie and the presentation. But in a world of people who are not interesting in thinking and doing better thinks than watching TV in freetime, a mass of idiots are growing up.
Sorry for my bad english - my german is better ;o)
Best wishes
Surplus-Max
# posted by Anonymous surplus-max : 3:57 PM
 
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