Finding the time

Clay Shirky gave the following speech earlier this year.

Where do people find the time – part 1:

Where do people find the time – part 2:

Here’s the part that most impressed me when I first watched this:

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. 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. 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.

(from herecomeseverybody.org)

I find it intriguing to envision people of a society migrating from consumer roles to consume/produce/share roles. If the cited numbers are any indication at all, then there is a huge amount of cognitive surplus available.

The image of a large group of people collectively waking up and beginning to do things comes to mind. Given how much time apparently really is available, Wikipedia, Facebook, blogging, and so forth can really only be the very tip of the iceberg.