In his recent talk at the Web 2.0 conference, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus – Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirky provides (and expands on) an extremely interesting metric for a unit of human creative time expenditure, the Wikipedia:
…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…
His key idea is that society as a whole is coming off a bender (of sitcoms and other television shows) brought about in response to the sudden reality of “free time” after WWII. And now that we’re off the bender, we have a lot of attention to put on things that we didn’t before – like Wikipedia, and World of Warcraft, and … social media, social transformation, social innovation… and whatever we can think of. That:
…however lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf [i.e., play WoW], I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter [i.e., watch Gilligan's island].
Another brain-opening meme from Clay (his ETech talk about ontologies from several years ago was another major brain-opener for me). You can buy his new book Here Comes Everybody
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