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Where do people find the time?
I'm downloading a talk from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and it occurs to me - while I'm waiting - that doing so at a rate of 1.4 MB/s (with excursions to nearly 2 MB/s) means the "pipe" Cablevision provides is big enough, and that consequently, downloads that insist on creeping along at 50 kB/s are being throttled somewhere along the way, perhaps even at the source.
Just an observation.
The fact that Iam was waiting for the download to finish is no indicator of an ability to pause and watch the video of Clay Shirky discussing his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. That's for later.
I was, however, intrigued by what is apparently an excerpt posted at boingboing, wherein an effort is made to respond to the rhetorical question "Where do people find the time?" when they look upon an effort as seemingly large as, say, Wikipedia.
Shirky's thesis is that the free time that's cropped up over the past 50 years or so has created a "cognitive surplus" that has been absorbed by - you guessed it - television.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation worked out by Shirky and one Martin Wattenberg of MIT suggests that the whole of Wikipedia represents something like 100 million hours of human thought, which is a pretty impressive number.
However, people in the US watch 200 billion hours of television each year, which is the equivalent of 2,000 projects as big as Wikipedia.
And here, I'll go off on my own, and note that Wikipedia recently celebrated its 7th birthday, so, for the sake of argument, if we assume that all of Wikipedia is the result of only the past two years of effort, it turns out that, over the course of a year, we spend 4,000 times more hours watching the boob tube than working on Wikipedia.
Taken as a percentage, that's 0.025%.
To put that in perspective, if you work an 8-hour day and were told you could go home 0.025% earlier, you would shave about 7 seconds from your work day.
I need to get back to work, but this is an intriguing line of inquiry.
Cheers...
Just an observation.
The fact that I
I was, however, intrigued by what is apparently an excerpt posted at boingboing, wherein an effort is made to respond to the rhetorical question "Where do people find the time?" when they look upon an effort as seemingly large as, say, Wikipedia.
Shirky's thesis is that the free time that's cropped up over the past 50 years or so has created a "cognitive surplus" that has been absorbed by - you guessed it - television.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation worked out by Shirky and one Martin Wattenberg of MIT suggests that the whole of Wikipedia represents something like 100 million hours of human thought, which is a pretty impressive number.
However, people in the US watch 200 billion hours of television each year, which is the equivalent of 2,000 projects as big as Wikipedia.
And here, I'll go off on my own, and note that Wikipedia recently celebrated its 7th birthday, so, for the sake of argument, if we assume that all of Wikipedia is the result of only the past two years of effort, it turns out that, over the course of a year, we spend 4,000 times more hours watching the boob tube than working on Wikipedia.
Taken as a percentage, that's 0.025%.
To put that in perspective, if you work an 8-hour day and were told you could go home 0.025% earlier, you would shave about 7 seconds from your work day.
I need to get back to work, but this is an intriguing line of inquiry.
Cheers...