Cognitive Surplus

The Web today seems to be enamored with Clay Shirky’s ideas on “cognitive surplus.” I’ve been making essentially the same argument since I ditched my TV in 2001, but okay, fine, at least now people are listening. Maybe I can get Shirky to add professional sports into the mix along with gin and television—you know, that bit where we as a society deem it appropriate to pay a bunch of guys several million dollars annually to entertain us by moving a ball back and forth for a few hours?

I do, however, have to take slight issue with these lines:

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.

Now that we have a unit? So hours aren’t units? I really don’t see a need to take a concrete measure and redefine it in fuzzy terms requiring back-of-the-envelope calculations like “Wikipedia projects.” Maybe it helps some people gauge the magnitude of the problem, but it just annoys the rest of us.

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