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.
...but incidentally, Clay, your MT commenting script is broken, so I can't use my surplus effectively, so I'm posting this instead.
This calculation alone is pretty mind blowing. I was talking to someone a while ago about why US soccer fans aren't as ravenous as soccer fans just about everywhere else in the world. For me, it came down to american TV consumption. Soccer fans everywhere else - or even in newly-emigrated populations here - grown men are going out on their lunch time or days off to play the sport that they are interested in following. They are invested because they are involved, even if it is only in their neighborhood game, while here in the US, most of the time they are just watching it passively. If we could get American politics to be more like soccer everywhere else, things would probably look a lot brighter. I'm not pessimistic about this ideal, but I'm not holding my breath either.
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