Clay Shirky recently posted a transcript of his Web 2.0 Expo keynote.

…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.

Then Shirky asks us to compare that to television. He says we Americans collectively spend about 200 billion hours of our time each year watching the tube (the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2006 and NHAPS in 2004 both concluded the average American spends 5.7 hours watching TV daily).

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.

This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Interestingly, the Television Bureau of Advertising reports that while TV viewing among adults has increased by double digits since 1988 (12% for women, 15% for men), viewership by teens and children has been basically flat.

And that’s scary news to those who’d previously thought the internet was a passing fad, that YouTube and Wikipedia would fade away. A 2005 Pew Internet Project study revealed demands by teens for participation and sharing in all media. Their suggestion: “Think of [your] relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.”

Shirky points to lolcats. The “cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions” are exemplary of a new, participatory form of entertainment — exactly the kind PIP’s teens were demanding.

When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that message — I can do that, too — is a big change.

The takeaway? “Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.” That’s where people find the time for Wikipedia, lolcats, linux, and countless other endeavors. And this is all just beginning.

I wasn’t planning on posting much about Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, but I did. And now I find myself posting about it again. Thing is, I’m a sucker for historical analogy, and Clay Shirky yesterday posted a good one that compared the disruptive effects of mechanized cloth production to today’s internet.

Yes, that’s actually the birth of the Luddite movement, or at least where it got its name. And, though I was aware of the story, Shirky’s study offered details I’d not know previously.

Most interesting was the news that the handweavers largely opposed only the mills that sold their textiles cheaper than the handweavers did. And mills that sold their products at artificially high prices and used the efficiency of the mechanized looms to earn exorbitant profits weren’t opposed by the handweavers.

Hmmm….

Now back to Keen. Keen “doesn’t oppose all uses of technology, just ones that destroy older ways of doing things.”

But Keen is wrong. Using the internet without putting new capabilities into the hands of its users (who are, by definition, amateurs in most things they can now do) would be like using a mechanical loom and not lowering the cost of buying a coat — possible, but utterly beside the point.

The criticism here is that Keen wants technology to be controlled, and the value enjoyed exclusively by the establishment.

The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.

Keen is right in understanding that this massive supply-side shock to freedom will destabilize and in some cases destroy a number of older social institutions. He is wrong in believing that there is some third way — lets deploy the internet, but not use it to increase the freedom of amateurs to do as they like.

(Emphasis added.)

web 2.0, internet, anarchy, control, The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, Clay Shirky, luddite, luddism, disruptive technology