Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus

[Lateral Exploration]

Great rambling/speech on where we currently stand with new knowledge creation/sharing based on the concept of "Social Surplus"....

http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

some excerpts...

'Wikipedia has taken 100 million hours to create...sounds like a lot until you realize in the us alone, 200 billion hours are spent watching t.v. each year. '

"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. 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. Only 1% of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation."

Imagine 10,000 Wikipedia projects being created and shared a year. Thats revolutionary...

http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

[Soundpolitic]

What a find! This is my favorite quote from the article:

It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.

I love the central idea of this article: that consumption is slowly but surely being replaced by participation. I participate in the online communities on DailyKos and The Albany Project because of the radically high exchange of ideas. I like the lolcats reference because they show up everywhere on these websites, whose sole stated purpose is the election of Democratic and progressive candidates for office. We call them "pooties." While the crux of the conversation is changing the politics of our country for the better, these pooties keep showing up, to add a smile to the conversation, making poltical discussion both serious and lighthearted at the same time...placing an emphasis on the fact that though we are conversing through ones and zeroes, we are still human.

And that message -- I can do that, too -- is so essential to changing things for the better. It's at the heart of the Obama campaign for President: saying "Yes, We Can!" when faced with a challenge. I won't repost the whole thing here, but I'll link to my recent blog on DailyKos about what "Yes We Can" means to me for any interested.

[Lateral Exploration]

Awesome mantra, let's jam!

[Lateral Exploration]

One problem i'm beginning to realize about this social surplus is that their really is no Social Surplus. The people who used to watch tv have come online... but not to better themselves or society...only to spend the time they would have filling their cravings with tv, online. So instead of tv it's news sites, humor sites, entertainment blogs, myspace, comedycentral.com etc..

Lately i've been absorbed by my job, spending a ton of time online, but not doing anything thats outside the box, creation, sharing etc..

I think the hope of a social surplus being completely spurred on by the internet alone is a false hope .

In order to build this social surplus it must come from a deeper root...