Couple of interesting videos today. First, Howard Rheingold put up a video of a WELL party. While most people probably focus on the personal style, I thought two statements in the video were particularly interesting. Twice people referred to The WELL as a television alternative. First, because television was boring, then a second partier quantified the amount of time he spent vs. the amount of time most people watch television. He posited that it was about 1/5 as much time.
This reminded me of Clay Shirky talking about the cognitive surplus being used by television at the Web 2.0 conference. By his calculation, Americans spend as much time every weekend just watching commercials as it would take to re-write wikipedia from scratch…. in every language.
I’m not certain that is actually true. One hour of work is not always equal to one hour of work. Fatigue and other factors can make working weekends less than full throttle. Even so, the rough tabulation is staggering. Clay needs a better yard stick than Wikipedia for the average joe to understand. Maybe how many episodes of CSI could be created or missions to the moon. Here is Clay’s stellar talk… below Clay’s video is Howard Rheingold’s vlog post.
And here is The WELL party video. Truly time capsule worthy.
