Did you know you can find most of the talks from Web 2.0 Con last week on Blip TV? Well you can! And included in the bunch is an extra special one from my favorite internet guru, Clay Shirky. There is also a transcript of his talk here if for some reason you hate video.

In this talk, Shirky very poignantly shares his insight into why humans (mainly American ones) have wasted years of their lives watching television. It’s uncanny, by positioning his argument around an interview with a TV producer, he takes seemingly choreographed stabs at how and why the Television has ‘masked’ our collective conscious (rather, our cognitive surplus) for over 50 years. Ouch.

I can remember as an adolescent, watching hours of music videos on MTV for entertainment purposes, totally not realizing that instead, I could have been getting a lobotomy, with similar end results.

All that aside, I think many people fail to realize how brainwashed they have been. And although I would like to take back my childhood from MTV and Nickelodeon, I know that is impossible, and that I must move forward. Luckily, now, is a great time to do that. Because of the networking capabilities of the internet and that we all suddenly realized that Television isn’t all that interesting, we have what Shirky refers to as a ‘cognitive surplus’, which for me, seems like a good thing. If you like numbers, here is a clever explanation as to how much it might be worth:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

It’s all a matter of finding positive ways to spend that time, on the internet, or better yet, with your friends and family, whatever it is, just make sure you do something.

Btw, most of the other videos from the conference aren’t all that moving, but, I must give a kudos to Blip TV for creating a sleak, simple presentation for the conference videos. It’s rrrrrreal nice.

(thanks, Squid!)

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