Invitations and Becomings

Clay Sharky has posted a great talk over at his website "Gin, Television and Social Surplus". The social surplus he's talking about is a cognitive surplus, and Sharky reckons we've been squandering ours on TV the way the first generation of the industrial revolution squandered their productive surplus on gin. The good news is, we're waking up, and finding new ways of putting it to work for our collective benefit. Wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg. Sharky argues that the thinking time spent in the US each weekend watching ads (about 100 million hours) is equivalent to building just one Wikipedia. Imagine what we could do with the other 200 billion hours (and that's still just counting the US)!

The point:

someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

Here's the video