Gabe Scelta at the Lexington Club
3464 19th Street
San Francisco, CA
August 9th - September 25th
Reception: August 12, 2008 7pm-9pm
Hope to see you there!
The Crest Art Show in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (which includes one piece of mine and one from my mom) was featured over the weekend in the New York Times.
In Williamsburg Store, Customers Find Art Among the Wrenches
One night last month, Joe Franquinha closed the store after the last customer left and turned the artists loose to set up their work... Read more >>]]>
Photo by Marlo Gayle, 2008
A recording of my portion of the reading is available at DubLit
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Both my mom (Bernadette Scelta) and I have pieces in the Crest Art Show in my hometown, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The show runs from June 7th to July 11th, 2008. Go take a look if you're in the area. You can see some photos of our art in the show on my Fickr stream. 
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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My project, EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Hazards In Your Area is in the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. Nonprofits and other social-change agents are expressing their visions of how data can be recombined to advance social missions. Mine is V2 of, StopNewNukes.org. I’ll be extending it to include all EPA Superfund (environmental hazards and disasters) sites so you know who to blame when you find yourself hanging out with Blinky, the three eyed fish.
Vote for me and help determine which of the other 120 projects that were submitted to the NetSquared Mashup Challenge will go on to the 3rd Annual NetSquared Conference (N2Y3). The top 20 projects will have an opportunity to discuss and display their projects at the Conference. Conference attendees will vote to select the top three projects. All 20 projects will receive a share of $100,000 in prize money.
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