
Does the Internet Make You Smarter?  - wherespaul
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284973472694334.html
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tokenadult
"the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million
hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching
ads."

That's a striking comparison. What really matters in people's lives is how
they spend their free time, when they could be doing anything from something
totally time-wasting to something incremental and productive. (I have just
recently become a Wikipedian. I essentially never watch TV.)

~~~
patio11
I wish Shirkey would start comparing Wikipedia creation not to TV watching,
but to the jobs that the people who write Wikipedia are (theoretically) doing
while they're writing Wikipedia.

One could say the same thing about OSS, at least in the context of OSS which
management does not know about.

If you think 10 hours of TV a week is a waste of human potential, you should
see what some people do for 40 hours a week. (Or vastly, vastly more, in some
cases. Why hello, Japanese salarymen...)

~~~
rayvega
Much agreed. It was just as all the people who truly believed that google
pacman contributed to millions of hours of lost productivity. Really?

In most cases, people at their jobs probably just substituted one "time
waster" with another (whether it be job related or not.)

The people running around screaming how google pacman cost valuable time are
probably the same ones who also idlely sit in far more costly pointless
meetings all day long.

------
cyunker
"The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period
before society had any significant digital freedoms."

Who are these pessimists?

~~~
michael_nielsen
I'm guessing he's arguing against people like Nick Carr and Andrew Keen,
who've gotten a great deal of press in prominent places. Certainly, Keen seems
to have the point of view Shirky is describing. Carr is more nuanced, but
still seems to be arguing for something pretty close to that point of view.
These points of view are uncommon amongst hackers, they're quite common in
other parts of society. Certainly, many journalists seem to want a return to
the 1980s.

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raju
There is a video where Clay Shirky discusses a similar issue -

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyoNHIl-QLQ> (Part 1 of 2)
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNCblGv0zjU> (Part 2 of 2)

Link to the transcript of the video above and HN discussion

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174410>

