Social Surplus: a Wikipedia a Weekend.

I’ve read this article before, but I came across it again and still really love it. Gin, Television, and Social Surplus discusses the notion of Civic Surplus, i.e. free time and what we do with it. This is one of those realities that give me great hope for the future. We have the time to solve our problems, we just have to learn how to use it, and we have to learn quickly. Some choice tidbits:

(H)ow big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, the whole project… that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human 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.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first… It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society…

It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, hold out an invitation to participation. And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change…

And 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. 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…

(These) are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing (sic).