Reaction to Clay Shirky's Speech

I found Shirky's speech both interesting and insightful. He talked about how people these days have an immense amount of free time on their hands. This excess of time, in the mind of Shirky, is a social surplus that needs to be tapped into. I didn't realize until listening to Shirky that wasting time (on things like T.V.) was such a big issue in our society. As he put it, our country wastes two hundred billion hours watching T.V. per year...(if you cant visualize it, look at it as a number -- 200,000,000,000 hours). That's also equivalent to 2,000 wikipedia projects per year. Imagine if instead of wasting time on unproductive activities that people actually decided to undertake a project of substantial magnitude...the possibilities are endless. I think that our society is actually moving away from this and towards Shirky's ideal. New technological innovations are showcasing greater individual participation recently. In fact, Shirky relays a story of a 4-year old looking for a mouse for a T.V. This shows that participation in technology is so widespread that the young child automatically assumed participation was a characteristic of all technology (and in my mind, technology is evolving towards that).