Daily Archives: May 2, 2008

Gin, Television, and cognitive surplus

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Wonderful talk by Clay Shirky

I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her 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.”

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.”

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. 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. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation…

It’s funny: I get asked the same question a lot. How do I find the time to pay attention to all the stuff that’s on the Net? And part of the answer, of course, is that I don’t watch television. So I’ve got 22 hours extra a week free for intelligent pursuits. I was a TV critic for a major national major newspaper and, before that, a serious weekly magazine for 13 years, so I’ve done my time in front of the box.

Actually, come to think of it, even when I was a TV critic I watched relatively little television. At a time when the average British viewer was watching 22.5 hours a week, I was watching no more than seven. I was just very selective for the simple and obvious reason that one cannot write a weekly essay about 23 hours of TV. And I’ve never, ever watched an episode of Coronation Street or EastEnders!

Paying attention

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Great post by my colleague, Martin Weller.

It was the annual Open University internal conference this week, which had the title this year of ‘Making Connections’. There were some good presentations, but one of the key issues that arose was not what the presenters were saying, but what the audience were doing. My colleague Doug Clow was live-blogging the sessions he was in (e.g. see his account of my Learning Design session). He was told by three different people in separate sessions to stop as his typing was offputting. Doug gives his account here, and Niall backs him up here.

The audience of this blog may find this surprising, since the idea of not live-blogging would seem odd, but it shows we take certain behaviours for granted in our ed tech world. I found it rather ironic though in a conference called Making Connections that Doug should get these comments. He was making connections with people who weren’t at the conference (see the comments on his post), and additionally a few of us were twittering through the conference so we were making connections across the sessions (I set up a Crowdstatus page for those twittering). Making connections is about more than chatting over a glass of wine (although that’s nice too).

I think some people feel it shows disrespect to the speaker that you aren’t giving them your full attention. In fact, thinking through the act of people having laptops or other devices operating during a talk I give, I’m of the completely opposite view. If what I’m saying isn’t interesting enough for you to want to liveblog, twitter, look up sources or take notes on it, then I’m doing something wrong. And, if by some freak chance what I’m saying isn’t interesting, then I’d rather people were doing their email or reading blogs than sitting in my session feeling resentful because they are trapped. Hey, I’ve had people sleeping during a talk before – I’d rather they were tapping away on their keyboards.

Yep.