socialmedian: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Source: Here Comes Everybody

Apr 27, 2008

Summary

Explains how the architecture of participation is slowly taking advantage of the cognitive surplus that has been wasted watching sitcoms for the last fifty years.

Comments (3)

Wouter Havinga,

May 04, 2008

as per this article; It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. 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 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Gautam,

May 12, 2008

absolutely! I think that Clay Shirky is onto something big on this theory. Participation and sharing was never big media's strengths... but they seem to be knowing it intuitively, with text voting for reality shows growing in impact