So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia […] represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human 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.
From Clay Shirky’s blog (author of “Here comes everybody”)
Shirky is so good at pinpointing catchy statistics that make you gasp - I hate to sound like a super cynic but Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death as early as 1985 has illuminated how televisions and the rising entertaining industry might potentially draw empty, unrelated soundbytes into the public. Television and Wikipedia (the internet), all in all, are just not comparable mediums. One hour spent on watching television is definitely not the same as one hour editing Wikpedia - at the very least they come from dramatically different populations.
What’s more interesting is my American friend’s assertion that in recent years because of the whole Iraq/CreditCrunch gloomy atmosphere, American television is further driving themselves into the Escapist regime (think Hero, Lost, American Next Top Model, American Idol).
On top of this, Wikipedia editors are not ‘the public’.
I am constantly amazed by how ‘human beings’ can edit this much on Wikipedia… (minus the bots, of course).
And duh, hour statistics never cease to excite geeks