What will we do without sitcoms?

Okay, this isn’t technically a business-related post, per se. Maybe it has something to do with growing opportunities for businesses to find customers online, but really, if I'm being honest, it’s just a cool article. 

Check it out: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. It’s the transcript of a talk Clay Shirky gave about his new book, Here Comes Everybody, which looks at the shift in attention from TV to the Internet.

“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. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.”

The asset Shirky calls attention to is the surplus in free time, which since the 1950s has been filled with television sitcoms. As the shift in attention moves from TV to the more participatory Internet, what will we build with our collective participation?