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Back of the envelope
Is Wikipedia just the beginning? Clay Shirky has turned off his TV and gotten down to work:
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.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
I thank Jules Sigall for the pointer.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on April 29, 2008 at 10:21 AM in Television, Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
But don't the two overlap? Every Wikipedia page on a TV show represents a cut in this surplus, because the author(s) had to spend the time watching the show--or at least researching it. Same with movies.
And does the back-of-the-envelope calculation take into account the time spent learning or researching the information, or just the time needed to write it down? If Tyler contributes one line to an economics entry, does that reflect the 15 seconds spent typing, or all his years in grad school? And what about when Tyler gets a 'Markets in Everything' idea from watching an ad? Does just the one ad overlap, or do you have to include all the ads necessary for Tyler to be present at that given moment?
Posted by: MP at Apr 29, 2008 10:53:56 AM
On a realted note, Wikipedia
will have to figure out a way
to organize it's stuff better.
what is currently available is
awesome but as the above calculations
show, wikipedia will simply
crumble if grows 100 times from
here.
Posted by: sa at Apr 29, 2008 10:55:32 AM
"Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads."
Does anyone else think these numbers are fishy? I mean, do you actually watch the ads? I don't.
Posted by: Klug at Apr 29, 2008 11:33:21 AM
100 million hours of thought versus 200 billion hours of...what? Isn't what we have here a comparison of apples and oranges? Unless, of course, Wikipedia entries are just another form of entertainment for the editors.
Posted by: M.D. Fatwa at Apr 29, 2008 11:33:50 AM
I suspect, however, that this is a case where self-selection works to our advantage. God knows how much Wikipedia would suffer if the average new entry was written by the average TV watcher.
Posted by: jfalk at Apr 29, 2008 11:52:07 AM
Is this argument omitting consideration of marginal productivity? It seems the assumption here is that people can deploy their capital with constant productivity. Besides, the real culprit of lost productivity must surely be sleep; How much time do people spend mindlessly sleeping?
Posted by: BoredStonedGuy at Apr 29, 2008 12:16:17 PM
Not only do many people not watch all the ads (tivo through, flip channels, use the restroom, get a snack...), but tv time is often multi-tasking time. I'm not much of a multi-tasker, but much TV takes so little brainpower that it's often also "news-
reading time," "dinner making/eating time," "gym time" or social time.
Creating a wikipedia entry, however, monopolizes a lot more of one's capacity.
Posted by: Robin at Apr 29, 2008 12:43:24 PM
Great find; I went over to Shirky's site and read the whole thing. You've provided me with my thought fix for the morning. Thanks.
Posted by: johnrobert at Apr 29, 2008 12:43:34 PM
I wonder if there really is this greater surplus or if Wikipedia (like similar online/distributed efforts) is simply more visible than other hobbies -- if you are a knitter or a hiker, your hobby doesn't leave much of a record. It would be near impossible to give a good estimate of how much time people have spent knitting or hiking because there's no good way to collect all of the evidence of people doing it.
Wikipedia does; you can give at least back-of-the-napkin numbers because edits leave a visible trace, complete with timestamps on user contributions.
Also, I wonder (but dare not examine too closely) how much Wikipedia effort actually comes out of work time rather than TV time...
Posted by: Kat at Apr 29, 2008 1:32:12 PM
I'm continuously amazed at Wikipedia. I often use it at work.
For example, this morning I needed to enumerate all the major television syndicators in the US. The media industry is very dynamic, so I found out that King World is now part of CBS Television Distribution, Columbia TriStar Television is now part of Sony Pictures Television, etc.
I also have found Wikipedia great at helping me figure out which television station is in which television station ownership group.
That said, I've contributed one Wikipedia article about a private turnpike from the late 1800's which was deleted because "it wasn't important enough" and another about an entomologist from the early 1900's which is being threatened with deletion for that same reason as well.
Posted by: Mr. Econotarian at Apr 29, 2008 1:43:41 PM
To be fair, Shirky isn't saying that this will be the case 100% of the time. I think he's largely making a point. A LOT of free time goes toward watching TV and a lot of people who don't watch TV and/or don't go out to bars have a great deal of time on their hands. I found this out when I quit smoking, I had a great deal of free time durin the day that previously went to going outside to burn one.
He has a good talk here (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/02/shirky) where he basically explains the thesis. I think that he is understating the structural work that goes on but that is kind of his point: the underlying structure matters less once it is properly and transparently deployed. Most people editing/reading wikipedia don't know how the administrative and technological architecture (and BOY-O! is there a lot of it) helps it keep afloat. But if you've got a chance, try to deploy mediawiki on your own webserver and see how quickly you begin to miss templates, catergories, edit buttons, and the like. It is really a different world.
As for the comment above me (Mr. Econotarian), try resubmitting those articles w/ a few solid secondary sources and references. Some of the time the deletion debate gets dumb, but usually if the sourcing is there (and a lot of editors like me have access to JSTOR, LEXIS, etc) someone will find it. It is, of course, best that you find it first so that it doesn't happen at all. But if you want some help with it, just post the turnpike article and tag it with {{rescue}}. Help will come. :)
Posted by: Adam Hyland at Apr 29, 2008 2:08:23 PM
I find this a fascinating topic, partially because it's so Asimov to think of a huge repository of human thought that's finally going to be unleashed. I'm at once intrigued and highly skeptical, and I can't decide which attitude is correct. The intrigued side says that even if the percentage of TV time that goes to creative, knowledge-driven pursuits is tiny, it will still be a massive change in human culture. The skeptical side is a little more muddled. Can TV time really be converted into useful work on Wikipedia or something useful? I think most people have a somewhat inelastic amount of productive time per day in them. I would expect TW watching to be more likely to transfer over to reading blogs and celebrity news, playing World of Warcraft, IM'ing people, etc. In other words, something that doesn't require any real effort. I know WoW does require effort, but the weird uncertain reward psychological efforts involved with it make it somewhat of an exception. To the extent that people spend more time typing away on Wikipedia, would they shirk their job or school classes or something else important? I'd like to think a big increase in productive intellectual work is possible, but I could see it being a big pipe dream...
So that's neither here nor there. To take another tack, I think the rise of a large educated class in China, India, and so on will make a much larger impact on the world than any shift from gin or television to something more productive.
Posted by: Greg at Apr 29, 2008 3:18:57 PM
Wikipedia represents not merely 100 million human-hours of effort, but thousands of years of human civilization.
Posted by: nick at Apr 29, 2008 8:41:02 PM
I agree with what Clay Shirky says in the article. I have stopped watching TV a month and a half ago and never felt better. I find myself doing a lot more of things I always wanted to do but "never had the time". TV is a subtle time sink and by the time you know it, it is past bedtime.
Posted by: Divya at Apr 29, 2008 9:29:59 PM
Apples to oranges. Most people don't write anything. Wonks and nerds probably already spend more time READING Wikipedia than watching TV.
Posted by: Paul N at Apr 29, 2008 11:14:25 PM
The conclusion I'd draw is that "hours" is the wrong metric to be using when measuring thought.
Posted by: gek at May 1, 2008 9:54:38 AM
