I’m bit late to the game, but check out this video of Clay Shirky at the San Francisco Web 2.0 Expo.
My favorite part is when Clay is talking about his experience with the TV producer. She asks him, “Where do people find the time?” when he tells her about people editing the entry for Pluto on Wikipedia. He comes out with some amazing numbers. The time comes from the cognitive surplus that TV has been masking for years. All of Wikipedia (all languages) equals the cumulations of 100 million hours of human thought. TV watching 200 billion hours in the US alone every year. That’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year. People who ask where we find the time when looking at Wikipedia don’t realize how tiny a project like Wikipedia is in terms of time.
I love this!! I always hear “Where do you find the time?”, “Do you ever sleep?”, etc. The fact is I get my 8+ hours of sleep a night and I get to relax as well. I just manage my time differently. I still watch TV - but I do it while browsing the Internet - hitting pause when I find a good article or want to write a new post (like right now).
The other great part of his talk was when he shared the story of his friend’s kid looking for a mouse attached to their TV:
Here’s what four year old knows…media that is targeted at you, but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.
How awesome is that?? I gave 2 talks last week on the power of Web 2.0 and how we need to use some of these tools and theories in our libraries - how our patrons want to participate with us, how our patrons love us and want to be a part of the library - and here is Clay Shirky saying basically the same thing. Why go to the library site if I can’t be a part of it? Why browse the library catalog when I can find books on Amazon and LibraryThing and add to the content?
Very interesting talk - and well worth watching if you haven’t already.
Yes, I hear that often too Nicole. Its actually funny–I stated retorting by how much time they could save by consolidation some web 2.00 tools and having the info pumped out to them.
That is fascinating about the amount of time spent watching television. I wonder what my percentage works out to be–I’m sure its high.
Yes, WHOEVER isn’t understanding how a huge a segment of our patron base communicates and networks using web 2.0 tools is in serious trouble. They are in trouble, as you say of losing support by becoming irrelevant.
Outreach to your patrons where they are.
Thanks for the good post.
[...] I watched another talk that touched on some of the issues I mentioned after watching Clay Shirky’s video. In Yochai Benkler talk entitled Open-source economics, he [...]