The significance of what has just begun

I joined a guided walk around the City of London on Saturday, taking in some well known, and some lesser known sights. We stopped at the spot where Wynkyn de Worde (apprentice of William Caxton who brought the printing press to England) set up his press and gave birth to an industry on Fleet Street.

This got me thinking about the new revolution that has just begun on the web, and this excellent essay by Clay Shirky sums it up perfectly. If you haven't got time to read it (or indeed his book, which I just started this weekend) then here's the central idea:

There's a new generation of media 'consumers' who aren't actually just consumers. To the new generation, a screen without a mouse attached to it is plain broken. This generation is creating content, mashing it up, sharing it and living it. This generation, unlike the one before, won't spend all of it's free time just watching TV, but it's not the drop in TV viewing figures that's interesting, it's what this generation might do with their time instead.

Shirky has calculated that about 100 million hours of human brain time has been invested in getting Wikipedia to its current state. Now, if just 1% of the time Americans [the world's Internet users] spend watching TV is diverted into new forms of creative media and not just consumption, we'd have enough time to create 10,000 Wikipedia's every year. It's quite mind-boggling when you think about how this is going to change us.

Sometimes it feels like the phrase 'social media' is already getting a bit tired, but we are actually just at the beginning of an incredible new stage of our development as humans.

Comments

[Trevor]

Funnily enough I was thinking something similar after reading a recent post over at Boing Boing, although they do cite different figures; 2,000 wikipedias of time watching TV in the US.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/27/death-of-the-sitcom.html

"Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus."

Still definitely time that could be put to good use. Although, as one commenter put:

"Yes, but how many of those hours are now used for reading blogs aimlessly or looking at captioned pictures of cats?"

:)

[Clay Shirky]

Just to be clear, the 10K Wikipedia projects is 1% of the time the *world's* internet users watch TV, not just the US.

(And Trevor, this is the piece on BoingBoing too...)

[Tom Nixon]

Thanks for stopping by clarifying that, Clay. I've corrected the original post.