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.

Think about it, at the moment this post went live, it was one hour, two minutes, and three seconds past midnight Greenwich Mean Time. Why’s that matter? It doesn’t, but it looks cool:

01:02:03 04-05-06

Of course, Brits and most others don’t represent dates that way, so the point is really only valid in US local time. C’mon, let’s wait up.

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Paul Bausch has concerns about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk:

I can imagine a world where my computer can organize my time in front of the screen better than I can. In fact, I bet [Amazon's Mechanical Turk] will eventually gather data about how many [Human Intelligence Tasks] someone can perform at peak accuracy in a 10 hour period. Once my HIT-level is known, the computer could divide all of my work into a series of decisions. Instead of lunging about from task to task, getting distracted by blogs, following paths that end up leading nowhere, the computer could have everything planned out for me. (It could even throw in a distraction or two if that actually increased my HIT performance.) If I could be more efficient and get more accomplished by turning decisions about how I work over to my computer, I’d be foolish not to.

Foolish not to, but who wants to work at the behest of a computer? And that’s Paul’s complaint.

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If I didn’t like flying, or at least if I couldn’t tolerate it, I wouldn’t making my third distant trip in as many months. And though I know many others spend a whole lot more time in planes than I do, I still think Vasken has a bit of a point in the following:

I couldnt help thinking about the horrid dichotomy that is airline travel… on one hand, my flight from Philly to Manchester takes 50 minutes, or 6+ hours less than the trip takes in a car–on the other hand, it took me 5 hours to get from my house to the place I was staying in PA, a savings of a mere 2 hours. Looking back, the stinking train ride took a full hour to transport me a whole 10 miles, the drive home was another hour (45 miles), and the security line comes in dead last (a full 15 minutes for 20 feet). The 50 minutes in the air? 350 miles, and they bring you drinks. What a marvelous technology, rendered almost useless by the inadequacies of American public transit and the paranoia of its citizens.

Anyway, see you in Corvallis.

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