by etech
Transfer from agrarian to industrial really sold a lot of gin for a generation. it took 30 yeasr before the institutions of industrial revolution we recognize came into being. gin was king.

20th century lubricant – sitcom. 5 day work week, rising middle class. first time had too much free time. filled it with TV. desperate housewives was gin of our times. only now are we starting to see cognitive excess as a plus.

interviewed on TV about book. What is he saying that is interesting? He discussed pluto on wikipedia. pluto dropped from planets. moved with lots of push-pull to move to a large rock.

Where do you find the time? Noone in TV should ask that question. well TV has masked it for 50 years. wikipedia is 100 million of human thought. TV is 200 billion every year. 2000 wikipedia projects a year watch TV a year. 100 million hours each weekend just to watch the ads.

so wikipedia is only a small portion of surplus. so how do you figure out what to do with surplus. no one has any idea of how to deploy it. early phase is all special cases. do not understand how it all fits. can;t predict outputs because of complexity.

try lots of things and hope fail informatively. wikimap for crime in brazil. put pushpin on map. converts tacit information to explicit. cops do not share the info. easier to rebuild from scratch than to get it from authorities.

someone working with cheap tools can have a huge effect. talking about WOW with TV. thought they were at least doing something. watched gilligan only choice. It is better to sit in the basement and pretend to be an elf than to wonder whether if Gilligan will get off the island.

Social participation is better online than to passively watch. media does not understand. only measures consumption. but people also like to produce and to share. so it is being split up not.

also the cognitive surplus is so large. if only 10% is carved out for producing and sharing – results in 10,000 wikipedia projects a year.

is it a fad? it is a shift coser to industrial revolution. society is not growing out of this, it is growing into.

Now has story. 4 year old looking for something behind new TV screen. asked what doing? Looking for the mouse.
screens that ship without a mouse is shipped broken.

media more than just consuming. it is producing and sharing. how to get ahold of cognitive surplus.