A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken

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Submitted by lipflip on 2008, July 17 - 00:35

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. Clay Shirky

This quote is from an interesting talk Clay Shirky gave at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this spring. He discusses the common question where people find the time to participate in all the Web 2.0 stuff like Twitter, personal blogs, Wikipedia, and Facebook. He states that this is nothing more than cognitive surplus and that this number is actually quite low compared to our societies dominant “cognitive heat sink” – the television. 200 billion hours per year are spend watching television in the U.S., or 100 million hours every weekend for just watching ads (Don’t miss “Paying for your attention”)…

But contrary to television – which is basically just consumed – the entry level for actively creating new content, new concepts for participation, and new ideas is very low on the internet. Shirky argues that the “physics of participation” is like the physics of weather: A lot of the factors are know, but the output can’t be predicted very well. So a lot cognitive surplus will go into new projects and new ideas. and many many will fail, but some will evolve and finally succeed. Most of these projects were unthinkable some years ago and this will lead to a transformation of society. Towards a society where not only consuming of media is normal, but also producing and sharing. A society where a television set without a mouse for remixing content is considered broken.

I guess he’s right.

Transcript

P.S.: His talk is quite dense and very informative. I don’t consider this to be a complete summary. It’s more like an appetizer.

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