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.

I’m not that much of a television junkie and I prefer a good movie or an interesting TED talk over the ad-bloated junk you find on television most of the time. I don’t even have a televion and I usually don’t miss it. But sometimes — on very rare occasions — there is something one might watch. May it be some world-changing news event or that unbelievable documentary with Betty Botterblom. That’s when Internet-based television via Zattoo.com comes into play.

Zattoo.com is a free internet television service that streams many normal television channels right to your Windows, OS X, or Linux machine. It’s is absolutely legal, as zattoo has contracts with the stations it streams. On the other hand not that many channels are available yet. In Germany, for example, the complete public service broadcasting is available, but none of the big commercial stations.

The service is available in many west european countries (i.e. Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) and the channels you can watch depend on your location (e.g. Pro7 is available for people from Switzerland, but not for people with an german IP address).

The Zattoo-Player has moderate hardware requirements, is really easy to use, but lacks some (unnecessary?) features like recording, time shifting, etc., and you need a broadband connection with at least 500kbit/s to use it.

The quality was… okay… but I noticed a few dropouts from time to time. That’s not surprising as Zattoo is based on Peer2Peer technology: Your machine will re-stream parts of the content back into the net.

Go ahead and give Zattoo.com a try. But always keep in mind:

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985

Ich hab ja schon vor einiger Zeit auf die deutsche Adaption von IT Crowd &ndash dem I Team – hingewiesen und am 4. Januar geht's damit nun endlich (?) los.

Bei Polylux/Polylog gibt es im Beitrag über Geeks & Nerds einen ersten Videoausschnitt aus der Serie (ab 2:01).

Leider sieht das so aus, als ob die Serie nicht nur vom Original inspiriert, sondern ganz und gar kopiert worden wäre. Warum hat man sie dann nicht gleich synchronisiert?
Ich finde, dass durch das deutsche Nachstellen viel von dem Humor verloren geht, der diese Serie ursprünglich auszeichnet hat. Das kann eigentlich nur noch ein Peinlicher Reinfall für Sat.1 werden. Gerade wenn man bedenkt, dass die meisten "Geeks"das Original schon längst gesehen haben.

Wer lieber das Original schauen will, kann sich für ca. 45e die 1. und 2. Staffel der Serie als UK-Import von Amazon kaufen.

Update: Die erste Folge gibt's auf der Sat.1 Homepage zum umsonst anschauen... Grauselig.

The british television sitcom The IT Crowd is an hilarious show about two geeks ("standard nerds") and their not-so-tech-savvy boss working in the IT department of Reynholm Industries.

I just read that the show will not only be recreated for the US market (see NBC's US IT Crowd website), but that the german TV station Sat.1 is creating a german version as well.

The counterpart to Denholm Reynholm will be played by Sky Du Mont.