May 13, 2008
Is that a big number? - Wikipedia edition
Clay Shirky reports on a conversation with a TV producer, after describing a flurry of activity on the Pluto page:
She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
So how big is that surplus? So 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.
100 million hours sounds like a big number, but as Clay goes on to describe, it’s tiny. 100 million hours is about 20 minutes per US citizen - roughly the amount of time collectively spent watching advertisements in a typical weekend. (That’s Clay’s number: I’d have guess it only took an evening for each American to watch 20 minutes of adverts, but I am clearly a TV-pessimist and out of touch.) HT: Virtual economics.
Update: My TV pessimism was correct - see Comment No 2 from Gerald, below. Thanks, Gerald!
As a relatively infrequent contributor, one of the great things about open digital information sources like Wikipedia is that we all get way more out of it than we put in. I’ve spent probably ~30 hours writing articles there, and a few thousand hours reading.
Posted by: Joe | May 13th, 2008 at 5:10 pm | Report this commentI just got the latest media comparison study from the Television Bureau of Advertising and Nielsen Media Research. According to them, the average American adult watched 3.9 hours of television yesterday. (”Where do people find the time?” indeed!)
A typical half-hour television program in the United States contains 22 minutes of program and 8 minutes of advertising, giving 16 minutes of advertising per hour.
So a typical American sees 62.4 minutes of advertising per day. Clay’s estimate was way off.
Posted by: Gerald | May 13th, 2008 at 10:04 pm | Report this commentWhere do we find the time? There’s only 31 hours in a day, compared to 24 a decade ago, according to a recent study:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3735970.ece
There’s 7 hrs. daily right there, without any TV viewing at all. Mind you, I’ve been reading while watching the TV since I was a child. I find the TV fills in the dull parts in the reading, and vv.
I probably hit 31 hour days a decade before I got a home computer, cable time-shifting and DVD time compression. With a DVD you compress 84 min. or more of live TV into 66 min. of websurfing, reading, cooking, folding laundry, bathing, etc. Also, I sometimes can’t resist having the TV weather or news on while I am websurfing AND watching my shows on DVD.
Rather than an impediment to a busy intellectual life, a TV is just another channel which can be combined with the computer, telephone, text-messaging, etc.
My friends didn’t seem to mind me reading while we watched movies and chatted. And it’s much easier to keep up on a breaking news story with your online acquaintances if you don’t have to keep jumping from tab to tab, searching for better and more up-to-date news sources.
You’d be surprised who I’ve seen plugging their books on “The Colbert Report”. If the show were live, you’d find that a clever joke or interesting factoid hits the web before you’re done your sentence. If the person who reads it is on their Blackberry it can bounce to India and thirty other places before you pause for laughter.
Posted by: Brant Boucher | May 14th, 2008 at 7:55 pm | Report this comment