Don't They Have Jobs?

This is a question I get asked a lot by people who are trying to understand where people find the time to participate online.  My normal answer is that they do less of other stuff - including TV.  But now I've got a much better answer thanks to Clay Shirky including this gem: "If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.  I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.  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.  Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation."

[Joe at MediaBistro has summarised this perfectly - "A wikipedia a weekend spent watching ads."  Brilliant!]

Comments

[Simon]

But TV viewing figures have remained static! So people are either spending time online while watching TV (new research suggests this could be quite a high proportion of home Internet users), or they are cutting down on other stuff - non-sedentary leisure, sleep etc

[Simon]

...But not to take anything away from a very interesting theory. And Clay is right - in the grand scheme of things, it isn't all that much time spent

[neilperkin]

I love his whole concept of the 'cognitive surplus' from which social and collaborative stuff will gain share. So true that the most repeated comment from people who are not currently engaged by it is 'where do you find the time?'. Well, tonight I'm not sat watching property ladder for a start ;)

[James Cherkoff]

Yes, it's a good one isn't it. I like that he's highlighting something quite obvious with a few simple numbers: "The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation".

[David]

Before work , after work , between kids bb games , If you want something from it you have to put in the time I am hoping it pays me back someday

[James Cherkoff]

Stick with it David!