This was a talk given by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (April 2008). I was in the audience, it was brilliant. Basically it describes how gin lubricated humanity’s transition from 7-day a week work-survival mode into the 5-day week industrial revolution. Now that people had free time on their hands… what will they do!?

Here are highlights from my notes, but the best parts I wasn’t writing or Twittering, so below my highlights is the link to the full transcript.

Where are we finding all this new “extra” time for playing with Social Media sites (Facebook, etc)? Well… “Human’s now have a cognitive surplus that TV has been masking for 50 years..”

We spend “200 billion hourrs of thought per year in the USA watching TV”. Or to put it another way “now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television…”

Web 2.0 is developing an “architecture of participation” – best, and most succinct Web 2.0 definition yet, this is quoted from Tim O’Reilly actually, so he gets the cred.

“The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here…those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.”

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

On speaking to a TV producer about World of Warcraft, “I could see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.” At least they’re doing something. Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? Yeah, I saw that one too….However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, from personal experience, it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter..”

Traditional media was about consumption, the new paradigm is about consumer consuming, producing and sharing; so if it is “targeted at you but does not include you, it is by definition broken.”

Transcript:
http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

[addendum] Video:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/04/web2expo-clay-shirky.html

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