“Where do people find the time?”
This is an excellent speech given at the recent Web 2.0 conference by Clay Shirky, author of a book called Here Comes Everybody. In it he argues that people are just now learning how to deal with the “cognitive surplus” of modern society, that people are starting to get off the couch, turn off the TV, and create something.
Among the highlights in his speech: Wikipedia, according to some back-of-the-envelope calculations that he cites, took about 100 million hours of thought to achieve its current state as a fantastic online resource. By comparison, the population of the United States alone spends approximately 200 billion hours a year watching television.
If everyone in the country turned off their TV’s and worked on something creative, we could see 2,000 Wikipedia-sized projects in a single year.
The speech runs about 15 minutes. Turn off that Home Improvement rerun and watch this instead. It’s worth it.