Down Time
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus is an important article, mostly because of this clear, sad fact:
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.
Comments
Alex Cohn
http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/09/02/20-stunning-social-media-statistics/ says that facebook users spend there 700 billion minutes. This translates into 7000/60=117 Wikipedias. Every month.