Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

No one who works in TV gets to ask the question, ‘Where do people find the time?’ You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.

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. This is a pretty big cognitive surplus.

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, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, 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.

This information may now exist some place in society, but it’s easier for me to rebuild it than get it from authorities.

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race—consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes.

But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

A four year old watching a DVD with family, gets up in the middle, goes to TV, starts fiddling with the wires. “What are you doing?” “I’m looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.