A useful statistics in the excellent book by Clay Shirky, “cognitive surplus“.
Cognitive surplus is that cognitive capability that is available during our free time. It has steadily increased during the Industrial Revolution, in particular in the 20th century. But, it has mainly been devoted to broadcasting media, and mainly TV.
American watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year (and, interestingly enough, this is still increasing).
All of Wikipedia, all articles, edits, in all languages represents roughly about 100 million hours of contributions (over 10 years or so).
Hence, Wikipedia, this extraordinary sum of human knowledge, permamently updated (so much that it is a worthwhile source of information) represents less than 0.005% of the available cognitive surplus.
So… can you imagine what will happen when just 1% of the available cognitive surplus will be used for the community?
That’s right, it will be a true Revolution, the Fourth Revolution.
When do you start contributing a small share of your cognitive surplus?
