Content area
Full Text
The sudden bounty of accessible creativity, insight, and knowledge is a public treasure, says a network guru.
Imagine treating the free time of the world's educated citizenry as a kind of cognitive surplus. How big would that surplus be? To figure it out, we need a unit of measurement, so let's start with Wikipedia. Suppose we consider the total amount of time people have spent on it as a kind of unit-every edit made to every article, every argument about those edits, for every language in which Wikipedia exists. That would represent something like 100 million hours of human thought.
One hundred million hours of cumulative thought is obviously a lot. A television producer once asked me about people who volunteer to edit Wikipedia, "Where do they find the time?" The people posing this question don't understand how tiny that entire project is relative to the aggregate free time we all possess. How much is all that time spent on Wikipedia compared with the amount of time we spend watching television? Americans watch roughly 200 billion hours of TV every year. That represents about 2,000 Wikipedia projects' worth of time annually. Even tiny subsets of this time are enormous:...