Gin, TV and Social Surplus

[asun2art]

This Blew me away.

"Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? 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."

[Googooboyy]

Um, this blew me away.

Three cheers to inter-racial marriage.

[Frets]

Re: Mariah Carey.
Thanks now I'm heart broken.

Re Social Surplus. I can honestly say I don't miss bowling, darts, or gin.
A few hours of learning or sharing information is much more rewarding.