Cognitive Surplus

[denny]

http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

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."

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 [one entire Wikipedia project] 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.

(the excerpt has been trimmed a bit, and I added the bold/italics)

Comments

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

I liked that article and I like wiki things. I think the the calculations are a bit unfair though. I don't have a TV but I spend a lot of time idling through LJ/planet-$geek when I don't have the brain-energy to do any of the many exciting things on my todo list, or to wiki-edit. I think this is a lot more equivalent to other people's tv watching time. Watching TV *doesn't* require a cognitive surplus. I'm sure some of the time people spend watching boring TV they do have the energy to do something else but can't think of it, but a lot of the time I suspect they don't.

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

*nods*
It's a wonderfully inspiring rant, even if it looks a bit shabbier when you think it through.
Replace *cognitive surplus* with *time surplus* and it becomes much more accurate. There are plenty of activities as brain-dead as watching TV, but potentially more useful. Knitting is one example, something like Project Gutenberg's distributed proofreading (http://www.pgdp.net) might be another. Editing wikipedia might count, if that can include "browse wikipedia aimlessly for hours, and correct the odd spelling mistake".

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

I don't think I take the point that knitting is more useful than watching television. In the first place, how useful is knitting? At the end of quite a lot of knitting, you end up with a garment which you could probably have bought for not much more than the input costs (although admittedly, not in a hand-knit version). In the second place, I think that watching television might have some use, because you might learn something (depending on what you're watching).

I suspect that the motivations for knitting and watching television are quite different. People who knit, it seems to me, enjoy the feeling of creating something.

Also, people can, and often do, combine watching the television with doing something else (like knitting), so I don't think it's reasonable to treat the two hundred billion person-hours as available for other stuff. For instance, I often watch television while ironing or cooking or eating, none of which could be combined with editting Wikipedia.

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

Good point. The article seems to make a (pretty dubious) assumption that creating things is good (esp. things that are long-lived and available to the whole world, regardless of the quality of the thing created) but that there is little social value to education, entertainment and relaxation.

But never mind. Speeches like this are rarely inspiring *and* watertight; I'll settle for just inspiring.