Friday, August 01, 2008

TV and gin

Seth points to this article, an excellent look at a new resources and how we handle them.
"And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year... One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects [the whole of Wikipedia] per year worth of participation.
I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?"

4 comments:

  1. Great article, indeed.

    But I must take issue with the author on this silly notion:
    "A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken."

    The invention of the mouse is a key reason why the computer industry has stagnated for more than 20 years. A mouse is a pathetic excuse for not being able to create a computer that performs automatic data processing. As opposed to the computer assisted manual data processing we now have.

    Imagine the crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey operating HAL 9000 using a mouse.

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  2. With a mouse, at least they'd know Hal wasn't eaves dropping!

    I guess a keyed microphone would work

    From "Star Trek IV - The whale movie"

    [faced with a 20th century computer]
    Scotty: Computer. Computer?
    [Bones hands him a mouse and he speaks into it]
    Scotty: Hello, computer.
    Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard.
    Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.

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  3. The mike joke was used in Third Rock From The Sun also. Good one.

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