Miscellaneous info-pr0n

April 28, 2008 in ordinary

Lots of info-pr0n-related goodies on the web-o-sphere today. The first is the great (is sporadically applied) new feature on WordPress.com which puts a little list of links to “possibly related posts” at the bottom of (eventually) every post on a WordPress.com blog. The second is a nice little info-harvesting feature on Facebook called Lexicon that will wade through the semantic muck of wall posts and other Facebook-ed ramblings and show you a pretty graph of how often the words or phrases you ask it about appear over time. Lastly, BoingBoing observes (via a talk by Clay Shirky) that the brain-hours used by Americans watching TV is roughly equivalent to the brain-hours of TWO THOUSANDS WIKIPEDIAS.

So 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 actual term they use is “cognitive capacity,” which I think is a little misleading. The hours spent watching TV are spent in a way that is obviously cognitively very different from hours spent obsessively researching and editing Wikipedia articles. However, the work of Wikipedia is certainly of a fundamentally different sort than that of a compendium of knowledge like a traditional encyclopedia, in that Wikipedia relies more on extremely localized expertise or knowledge, assuming that everyone knows a little bit about something, whereas, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica relies on experts who are expected to know everything about a particular thing.