Clay Shirky: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Video (15 mins.) of Clay Shirky's talk at last week's Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I'll add to the chorus of bloggers suggesting that it's worth hearing.



Or, if you don't have fifteen minutes, you can read a "lightly edited" transcript on Shirky's blog. At one point he recounts talking to a television producer about a particular Wikipedia dustup.

She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."