The lubricant of the 20th century was the SitCom....
We panicked because we had to deal with free time. The Sit Com saved us from that. So just as the emergence of the industrial society was lubricated by Gin. However, now we are seeing the intelligence surplus as an asset rather than a crisis.
So as TV usage goes down the cognitive surplus rises.
2,000 Wikipedia projects is spent watching TV each year!
We are still in the very early stages of participation. We must experiment and track the failures and learn from them.
The example of the building a wiki crime map of Brazil was given. One interesting comment: "It is easier to create the information from scratch using the cognitive surplus rather than try to acquire the data from the authorities.
"It is better to do something than nothing."
Media in the 20th Century is a consumption game. Media is a three phase game. Consume, Produce and Share.
When people are offered the chance to produce and Share they will leap at the opportunity.
The size of the cognitive surplus is so large that a 1% change is enormous. The World population watches a trillion hours of TV each year. That is the equivalent of creating Wikipedia 10,000 times over.
This is a fundamental shift. Society will grow in to this change.
"four year olds think that screens shipped without a mouse are broken"
in other words - Media that excludes us is a broken model.
