ClayShirky is still alive! He wrote a book, too – Here Comes Everybody. And recently I found a link pointing to an article on the book’s blog, and the article was a speech transcript, and in it he has an a little numerical thought on the time wasted by people writing and editing the Wikipedia – all of that prompted by a TV journalist asking the rhetorical question: “Where do people find the time?” And Shirky tells us that we get the time by no longer wasting it all on TV:
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. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.
Indeed! And there’s more food for thought in the article.
Via Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, via Monte Cook’s blog post on Shirky’s Thought Provoking Speech.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
#Life #Web #Wikis
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Great quote. Naysayers and cultural grumps argue that the internet is stealing time from traditional book reading. I’m more inclined to believe that it’s stealing time from television—and thus produces a net gain for reading of all sorts.
– Matt 2008-09-29 13:03 UTC