Gin, Television and the Social Surplus

As Tyler Cowen points out, blogs are successful aggregators only if they cover topics somewhat randomly. If you want to find out the most-popular/respected views on the state of the Russian-EU gas relationship, you're probably going to head straight to Google. Chances are you will not come here. Which is too bad, because Rory's just wrote an excellent essay on the topic. But as editors of a blog, we're striving to create "value-added" by providing reading material of interest on a whole range of topics, even if they occasionally have only tangential links to IPE. It's also more fun for us.

So here's a little essay I came across some time ago, but was reminded of by a recent conversation with a friend. Apparently, the internet has reached the point where one new blog is created every second. Thatsalottablogs. Admittedly, most of these blogs will be crap. But unlike the crap you find on television which has been vetted by marketing execs and focus groups, the crap on the internet is almost entirely home-made. Even better, what constitutes "crap" is a matter of subjectivity, so there's a much more democratic element to how people choose to use/waste their time on the 'net. Moreover, the creative potential inherent in the internet is almost too big to grasp. If someone has an idea and posts it on YouTube, it's possible to reach literally millions of people - take this absorbing video by Noah featuring an unreasonably addictive piece of music by Carly Commando.

So even if only a fraction of the stuff on the internet contributes to a better society in any shape or form, that's going to change our social landscape a great deal. At least, that's what Clay Shirky thinks is happening with what he calls our collective 'cognitive surplus:'

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. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

The above quote doesn't do this essay justice: there is much, much more in the full text of Looking for the Mouse. Also, if you're feeling extra-lazy, there's a video version of the same talk if you scroll down the page here.

(image from scienceofdrink.com)