Cognitive Surplus

I suggest you all take a look at this talk by Clay Shirky.

For those who can’t be bothered to sit through the whole 17 minutes, here is the tl;dr version.

• With the time the US spends watching TV yearly, we could create 2000 wikipedia projects.
• This massive waste of time, currently mostly occupied by TV, is called the cognitive surplus.
  • The cognitive surplus was a response to the free-time created by the 8 hour work day.
• The use of this surplus is changing from passive to active media.
• The future businesses and movements will figure out how to mobilize this surplus, web 2 is doing this in particular.

Now then, this brings up some questions for me

• Is this cognitive surplus enough to decentralize manufacturing?
• Can we create a relative scale of how much of this surplus different projects (reddit, youtube, etc) use? Eg. Xyz.com uses 0.7wiki of the surplus.
• Can we now view the primary purpose of old media as a way to consume the surplus? (puts the consume in consumerism
• Isn’t it a good idea to identify uses of the surplus that don’t produce anything (Solitare, TV, etc)