Excerpt from a review by Charles Fitzgerald. I read the book and agree it’s timely and useful.
The astonishing data point arises from a television producer’s reaction to his relating the story of Wikipedia: “Where do people find the time?” The impolitic answer of course is Wikipedia’s creators aren’t watching television. Shirky estimates that Wikipedia is the result of on the order of 100 million hours of work by a vast number of participants. This seems staggering until he puts it in context: Americans watch 200 billion hours of television every year and “we spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials.” That tees up the book: there is a vast collective cognitive surplus available to be harnessed if we can just turn off the television. What happens when billions of couch potatoes begin to participate, create and share collectively?
Book Review: Cognitive Surplus – Clay Shirky | Platformonomics
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