“Gin, Television, and Social Surplus – Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky

This is the most awe-inspiring article I’ve read for a long time.

Shirky points out that technological advances have given us (compared to previous eras) a lot of free time which until recently we’ve spent on consuming content (eg watching tv, reading books), whereas now Web 2.0 makes it easy for people to communally create content (Wikipedia is the obvious example; but another of my favourites is Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders and there are many many more).

“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.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?”