Where do people find the time?

This is the video of Clay Shirky’s talk, whose transcript I translated recently. The presentation comes in 2 parts. I’ve included the translation of the transcript at the end to make it easier to read along with the video; now we just need someone to put their cognitive surplus to work subtitling the video :wink:

Translated transcript:

Gin, television, and social surplus

By Clay Shirky

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

From there Shirky argues that the sitcom was the gin of the 20th century, the heat sink for all the free time society suddenly had to manage, and that we are only now waking up from that second collective bender.

His unit of measure for that cognitive surplus is Wikipedia, and it answers the question a TV producer asked him: “Where do people find the time?”

The whole Wikipedia project amounts to a hundred million hours of human thought.

Americans alone watch two hundred billion hours of television every year. Doing something beats doing nothing, he says, and even a lolcat is an invitation to participate: I can do that too.

The talk closes with the story of a four-year-old girl who gets up in the middle of a DVD and goes rummaging behind the screen, looking for the mouse.

From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse.