My post on the six-hour scene dovetails nicely with this speech by Clay Shirky, which argues that we’re living in an era that’s wrestling with a cognitive surplus:
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.
Where this line of reasoning gets fascinating is when you factor in other ways people spend their surplus, such as television:
Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I haven’t read Shirky’s book
(Thanks to John Gruber for the link.)