Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Last year, Chris Anderson identified the Long Tail of human potential — our collective free time activities now being connected by the Internet and automatically coordinated into wonderfully useful collaborative projects.

Now Clay Shirky explains the rise of that potential in Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, his speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. He identifies the things that soaked up our collective cognitive surplus throughout recent history — gin during the Industrial Age, television during the Information Age — and how the Internet will finally put that surplus to productive use in the Participation Age. Here’s how much potential lies untapped: all the hours of human thought wasted on TV each year, in the US alone, could be used to create 2,000 Wikipedias.

He also explains that, to the young children of today, a screen without a mouse is broken — a media device that does not allow participation is incomplete. I’m suddenly reminded of my two young godsons; perhaps they will eschew the mindless consumption we were conditioned to accept as media reality.

Oddly enough, the idea behind his speech came out of his rage at a clueless TV interviewer. Score one more for big media bias.