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).

Who Da' Nerd; Cell Phones and Laser Tag

I can't tell if I'm getting more nerdy (hard to imagine) or our world is, but either way this is pretty cool. There is a group in Spain playing what is affectively laser tag with cell phones. It’s pretty cool.

Some Links I've Been Holding on to

I just started a new job and it has been keeping me pretty busy. As such, I have not been able to post some of the interesting things I've found lately. So, here is a list of some interesting articles I've run across.

Mobile Phone Credits as Currency in Kenya points out that due to the recent violence in Kenya and the dependence of the population on mobile phones for their communication needs, mobile phone credits have become a better currency than the government issue money. It goes on to discuss communcation needs in times of disruption.

Reaching Out to Muslim Victims of Domestic Violence talks about what efforts are being made to address issues of domestice violence in the Muslim-American Community and some of the challenges that are being faced.

let's define our terms: what is a "social networking technology"? does just that.

Public Transportation, a Whole New World

As a first time big city liver, I am just beginning to be able to seriously imagine my life without the need of a personally owned car.  Want Better Transit? Unionize! Is an interesting article about the benefits to be had through Bus Riders Union’s. 

The Straphangers Campaign is perhaps the best model for the kind of resources transit riders unions can provide. But with advances in mobile technology, it's easy to envision a role for riders unions that goes much farther than online resource clearinghouses and communities. Imagine if it were possible to text complaints to a central online forum that automatically forwarded them to your transportation agency; let other riders know through a mobile network when there were problems on certain transit lines; upload a photo of someone who's harassing you on the bus automatically to a dedicated Flickr page, à la Hollaback (a place where women can post photos of their street harassers); or, contribute to interactive, user-generated maps of problem spots in the system that could help make the case for improvements.

It continues to amaze me how mobile technology is changing the way problems are conceived and dealt with.

Some Interesting Stuff

The Orwellian Projects is an interesting post at we-make-money-not-art about several art pieces dealing with surveillance and the loss of privacy. Worth a look!

Neighborhood Survivability over at Worldchanging raises a very relevant question these days: how do/can our neighborhoods help keep us alive and (relatively) comfortable during disasters?