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.

Flaunt it, baby, flaunt it!

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Lovely story in the New York Times…

Representative Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of Brooklyn and Queens, drives a 2008 Chevrolet Impala, leased for $219 a month. Representative Michael R. McNulty, a Democrat from the Albany area, gets around in a 2007 Mercury Mariner hybrid, a sport utility vehicle, for $816 a month.

“It gets a little better than 25 miles a gallon,” Mr. McNulty said.

Charles B. Rangel, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is not so caught up in the question of gas mileage. He leases a 2004 Cadillac DeVille for $777.54 a month. The car is 17 feet long with a 300-horsepower engine and seats five comfortably.

“It’s one of the bigger Cadillacs,” Mr. Rangel, of Harlem, said cheerfully this week. “I’ve got a desk in it. It’s like an airplane.”

Modest or more luxurious, the cars are all paid for by taxpayers. The use of a car — gas included — is one of the benefits of being a member of the House of Representatives.

There are few restrictions on what kind of car the members can choose, and there is no limit on how much they can spend. But the benefit can be politically sensitive, given the growing concerns about automobile emissions and an economy that has left many people struggling to pay for the rapidly rising cost of gas, which was averaging $3.63 a gallon nationwide earlier this week…

That’s what I like to see. No pennypinching in the Congress. There’s something especially touching in the Chairman of Ways and Means riding around in a Caddy, don’t you think? His ways, taxpayers’ means. Wonder how many legislators lease Hummers? You could get an entire tech start-up into a stretched one of them.

Still, none of them is a patch on Lord Berners (1893-1950), who had a piano installed in his Rolls. He also had a pet giraffe. And a foolproof system for always having a railway compartment to himself. Before the train started off, he would stand at the entrance to the compartment, frantically beckoning people in. It being England, he then travelled in solitary splendour.

They don’t make them like that any more, alas.

On this day…

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… in 1975, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and the war was over.

The photograph shows a North Vietnamese tank entering the Presidential palace on the day.

A night at the Opera

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We went to see English touring Opera’s production of Don Giovanni last night. It was competent and enjoyable, though not first rate. As usual, I had to be restrained by my lovely companion from singing along — especially when the tenor playing Don Ottavio, er underplayed Il mio tesoro. Here’s how it should be done, IMHO:

Or, even better, here’s John McCormack:

For some reason, my household seems to think that my operatic performances should be restricted to the bathroom. Bah!

Web pages continue to expand

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Register report:

The mean size of a web page has more than trebled since 2003 from 97.3KB to more than 312KB, according to a review of available research by WebsiteOptimization.com.

The mean number of objects per page has meanwhile near-doubled from 25.7 to 49.9. The authors blame external objects for the majority of delays experienced by web browsers.

The last calendar year saw sites really pack on the data poundage with widgets, gadgets, web crapps, embedded video and other mashtastic tinsel. The average page swelled by more than 60KB to 312KB by the end of December. Projections put next new year’s weigh-in at 385KB.

While broadband connections have more than kept pace with the rapidly fattening web, those stuck using dial-up are increasingly marginalised, unable to view many sites unless they plan a weekend around it.

BT bundles MS Office with Linux laptop that won’t run it

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Sometimes, you wonder what these folks are on. This from The Register …

This week’s award for the Most Astutely Selected Software Bundle goes to BT after the teleco tried to hook potential purchasers of Asus’ Linux-running Eee PC 900 by offering to ship it with a copy of Microsoft Office.

BT is offering the 20GB 900 for £335.99, but if anyone out there is willing to buy it for £422.34, the telco will include a copy of Office Home and Student in the box.

This despite the fact that, just a little way further down the page, BT’s list of Eee specifications admits that the elfin laptop is not “Office ready”.

The Register calculates that buying the bundle saves each punter a whopping £1.76 on the cost of purchasing the two products separately.

Like I say, what are these guys smoking?

US Department of Justice banned from Wikipedia

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Interesting story…

Wikipedia has temporarily blocked edits from the US Department of Justice after someone inside the government agency tried to erase references to a particularly-controversial Wiki-scandal.

Early last week, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) was accused of organizing a secret campaign to influence certain articles on the “free encyclopedia anyone can edit”. Just days later, the DoJ’s IP range was used to edit the site’s entry on the Pro-Israel “media-monitoring group,” lifting a new section that detailed the controversy.

The DoJ did not respond to our requests for comment. But odds are, the edits were made by a single individual acting independently. Wikipedia’s ban on the department’s IP is due to be lifted today…

The Digger fails (for once)

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Well, well. The Digger may have had his way with the WSJ, but he’s come unstuck in the UK. From The Register…

An independent appeals panel has overturned a heavily-criticised decision to hand control of the myspace.co.uk domain to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive Media.

Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service (DRS), had ruled in favour of MySpace in January, despite the domain having been registered by a small British ISP six years before the US social network was founded.

Barring any possible further High Court action by MySpace accusing TWS of “passing off”, the judgement, released on Thursday last week and passed to The Register today, means control of the address remains with Stockport’s Total Web Solutions (TWS).

TWS managing director Paul Fallon said: “We refused to be bullied by one of the largest media organisations in the world. This has been a very stressful case for a legitimate medium sized ISP to have to take on – but we had to defend our reputation and to stand up for what was right.”

A MySpace representative did not return a call requesting comment.

TWS originally registered myspace.co.uk in August 1997 to provide its clients with a cheap and easy-to-use homepage and email address in the early days of the web. It also registered bigspace.co.uk for the same purpose. 18 TWS customers still use @myspace.co.uk email addresses.

Bully for Mr Fallon!