{"id":431,"date":"2008-06-10T07:46:31","date_gmt":"2008-06-10T11:46:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/?p=431"},"modified":"2008-06-10T07:46:31","modified_gmt":"2008-06-10T11:46:31","slug":"where-do-people-find-the-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/where-do-people-find-the-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Where do people find the time?"},"content":{"rendered":"

An excerpt from Clay Shirky’s superb talk about social media and participation<\/a> (c.f. Cory Doctorow’s old rant on a similar subject<\/a>, via Sacha<\/a>):<\/p>\n

I started telling her [the TV producer] about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–“How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”<\/p>\n

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s an awfully big space for people to work on collaborative projects that are fun, social, and intrinsically meaningful.<\/p>\n

(With that said, something I’ve often wondered is why people apparently spend so much more time watching television at home than they do socializing.)<\/p>\n

Shirky’s talk is well worth watching, not just reading. Here’s Part I (ignore the opening music, it gets better):
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Part II:
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An excerpt from Clay Shirky’s superb talk about social media and participation (c.f. Cory Doctorow’s old rant on a similar subject, via Sacha): I started telling her [the TV producer] about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all… Continue reading Where do people find the time?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}