Time for participation taken from time spent watching TV

Consultant Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, answers the question he gets all the time from people not very familiar with internet phenomena: Where do people find the time?

Well, how do people find the time to edit Wikipedia, blog, comment on photos, rate movies, write reviews or make videos to upload? Shirky compares the time spent on these kinds of activities with the time spent on watching television, and he claims that the ‘cognitive surplus’ people used to mostly spend on watching TV-series is now trickling over to more participatory activities like social media. This trickle will eventually turn into a flood as society changes towards more participation. Shirky tells a story about a 4-year-old who tries to find the mouse behind a tv screen while watching a DVD movie – she took it for granted that she should be able to interact in some way with the media she was spending time on.

“Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.”

Clay Skirky

The talk from the Web 2.0 Expo is 16 minutes long and has been posted all over the blogosphere since Shirky manages to contextualize the change towards participation in a very interesting way. If you’d rather read it, Shirky has posted a transcript here: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.

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