Clay Shirky - who hid the mouse?

Why the future of the internet looks pretty secure.

Clay Shirky wrote a great book titled 'Here Comes Everybody' in 2008, a primer for understanding how the web and its tools (social media, publishing etc) has changed the way people organise - making a lot of traditional barriers to groups of people organising themselves disappear along the way. It's followed up with a supplementary blog, which keeps the book alive with case studies and discussions.

These 2 videos from YouTube are Clay talking on another favourite subject - how the world is being impacted by the web.

He was asked by a TV producer while talking about how Wikipedia works, "how will people find the time (to do all this internet stuff)?" The maths that follows is boggling:

Wikipedia, in all 100+ languages, since its inception in January 2001 represents about 100 million hours of human thought and effort - which has produced over 14m articles and references.

Television, in the USA alone, is calculated to absorb 200 billion hours of human effort and thought (what Clay calls the 'surplus') every year. That is the equivalent of 2,000 wikipedias each year.

In a single weekend, Americans invest about 100 million hours watching just the TV adverts.

A 1% shift of Americans watching TV adverts to some form of participation on the internet is over 50m hours of 'consumers' eyeball and brain engagement time a year.

Much of what he raises we have been talking about for a while within R+R's walls - in particular the erosion of advertising in traditional media like newspapers etc, but his thinking about 'one way consumption' vs a new generation of people who prefer to 'consume - produce - share' is very insightful. Their desire to share and be interactive might surprise you.

I love his critique of 'media that doesn't include you'. Brilliant! The new strategy for you and us is, as he says, looking for the mouse. Enjoy.




Part 2 starts here: