Tag Archive for 'Media'

Gin, Television and Social Surplus

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 29-April-2008
in Innovation and Media
. Comments

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has posted on what he calls the “social surplus” or the time we gain by participating in the culture versus just sitting back and watching it pass by pursuing activities like watching TV.

Clay specifically cites TV, and singles outs sitcoms, as a sort of glue holding society together as we transitioned from the Industrial Revolution to post WWII society with higher GDP per capita, better life expectancy and more free time. Now imagine if all that time spent watching TV could be put to use and benefit of society–the social surplus.

Shirkey’s back of the napkin stats are compelling

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.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. 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.

That is huge. Think of it another way,

this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

Time to turn off the TV and start participating…

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The Most Anti-Tech Organizations in America

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 3-December-2007
in Communications, Content, DRM, Innovation and Media
. Comments

Excellent article @ PCWorld written by Mark Sullivan on the 5 most anti-tech organizations in America. History is replete with examples of products, companies, and industries that fail to adapt and adopt to new technology. These 5 will be next.

From PCWorld by Mark Sullivan

Their names keep coming up over and over again in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country–those groups whose interests always seem to run counter to those of technology companies and consumers. They come in many forms: associations, think tanks, money-raising organizations, PACs, and even other tech-oriented industries like telecommunications.

The tech issues that they’re concerned with are what you might expect: digital rights management and fair use, patent law, broadband speed and reach, wireless spectrum and network neutrality. I talked to a good number of tech and media policy insiders in Washington, D.C.–mostly off the record–to find out who these groups are, how they operate, and who pays their bills. We’ll start with the biggest offenders first and work our way down.

1. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)

Issue: Copyright and Fair Use

The Internet economy should be a boon for digital media companies and for those of us that like to buy our music and video online. It’s also a very powerful way to connect with people of like mind with a view toward learning about new things to watch and listen to. Unfortunately, the content owners in the record and movie industries have mainly seen the Web as a platform for piracy, and have mainly failed to adapt their businesses to the realities of online, as one lonely industry executive recently admitted. Continue reading ‘The Most Anti-Tech Organizations in America’

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