http://www.influxinsights.com/blog/ 2008-07-07T04:23:58Z http://www.influxinsights.com/blog/article/1870/the-congnitive-surplus.html Some great thinking from <b>Clay Shirky</b> on the real threat to established media content, the idea that people start doing something useful with their cognitive surplus. <br><br><i><b>"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....<br><br>And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a <span id="qvsf0" style="font-style: italic;">trillion</span> hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that&nbsp; is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.<br><br></b><b>I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you? </b></i>"<br><br>It's a great new way to think about the 2.0 world and consumer generated content, at last!<br><br>From a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html">version</a> of the talk Clay gave at Web 2.0 last week. <br><br><br><br><br>Posted by Ed Cotton Influx Insights 2008-04-28T04:03:46Z