"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.)
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...)
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.
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.)