Since last months What I’m Reading post went so well I thought I’d write one for December. Books: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky. I’ve been a fan of Shirky since reading his first book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, when it came out. I watch or listen to any of his speeches I can get access to and he writes just as well. I love this section when he is talking about “finding the time”. Suppose we consider the total amount of time people have spent on it as a kind of unit—every edit made to every article, and every argument about those edits, for every language that Wikipedia exists in. That would represent something like one hundred million hours of human thought, back when I was talking to the TV producer. (Martin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher who has spent time studying Wikipedia, helped me arrive at that figure. It’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude.) One hundred million hours of cumulative thought is obviously a lot. How much is it, though, compared to the amount of time we spend watching television? Americans watch roughly
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