Clay Shirky is onto another great big line of thought in this article where he suggests an accounting method for the historical cognitive expense of TV. He quantifies the expense in terms of person-hours of work, using an educated guess of the attention budget of Wikipedia as the basic unit: 100 million person-hours. In the 2000 Wikipedias of hours currently sunk in TV we can uncover a deep vein of potential social and economic activity.
This blog is dedicated to suggesting projects aimed at gradually recouping that human energy!
