Cognitive Surplus

Throughout most of the 20th century, media has proliferated throughout society in a unilaterally, where viewers have consumed media but never interacted with its creators. Clay Shirkey, in his 2008 presentation at the Web 2.0 conference, "Where do people find the time?", argues that for the first time since the industrial revolution, people have become accustomed to interacting with media while consuming it. In the past, most people have been consumers of media, with only a select few have it producing it. The internet is now allowing amateur producers to distribute and share media effectively at very low costs. Since the internet has become a common vehicle for media delivery, the level of interaction, and thus, the collaboration between the consumers and producers has grown. More importantly, the audience now view media with the expectation of direct interaction with its creators. Similarly, creators expect immediate feedback from their audience. This collaboration in the media landscape is resulting in growing bodies of knowledge that would have never existed if people were unwilling to devote less time to broadcasted media.

If we consider the amount of time invested by people to generate content who would have otherwise exclusively been media consumers, it would be an interesting exercise to measure their "cognitive surplus". Shirkey defines cognitive surplus as the amount of intellectual capital that could have been used for productive purposes but was instead diverted towards unproductive areas. To put this in terms of a simple example, if all people watching television during a given year were using that time to create a piece of intellectual capital (such as that in a Wikepedia article), how much more knowledge could be proliferated throughout our society?

So some simple math...

Pure production (Wikipedia): All of wikipedia represents approx. 100m hours of thought (IBM statistic)
Pure consumption (Television): 200B hrs. of TV watched in the U.S. each year (US Census statistic)
Latest English article count in Wikepedia (9/20/09) - 3,038,292 articles
100m hrs. / 3,038,292 articles = ~33 hrs. per Wikipedia article
200B hrs per year / 33 hrs. = ~6 million Wikipedia articles per year
So...6m articles + 3,038,292 = ~9m Wikipedia articles

So if everyone in the U.S. stopped watching TV for an entire year and instead used that time to create Wikipedia articles, we would be able to triple the size of Wikipedia's body of knowledge within 1 year. That's a lot of cognitive surplus!