Clay Shirky’s “Gin and the Cognitive Surplus” is really an amazing summary of at least one way of looking at where we are, now, societally, and how interactive, collaborative media is on the cusp of radically changing the societal landscape.

In this piece, Shirky talks a lot about how TV sort of came to the rescue of a suddenly (relatively) idle public in the postwar expansion, a public that never before had much in the way of “free time” to deal with. The sitcom was born, and we all watched, and we watched for decades, and people continue to spend a lot of time in this one-way medium. In so doing, we consumed, for a while, an enormous cognitive surplus. Instead of creating something new, we watched a shitload of TV.

Anyway, he continues to relate the story of an interview with a TV producer who wanted to see if he was suitable for the show in question. In answer to a question about what sorts of “interesting” things he was seeing online, he talked a bit about the flurry of activity around the Pluto Wikipedia page as the astronomy community shifted its categorization from “planet” to “nonplanet thing,” expecting the follow-up questions to be about authority, participation, collaboration, and the like. The TV producer’s response? “Where do people find the time?”

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.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of 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. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

It’s about participation, and how any level of participation — LOLCats! — is more engaging, more important, and fundamentally more interesting than what people have been doing with that time since “I Love Lucy” showed up. It’s not all LOLCats, though. Social networks are already powerful and interesting, for example. If we use some tiny percentage of our TV time to do something participatory, something collaborative, something interesting and creative, how long before one of those somethings dwarfs Wikipedia and social networking in net value? Of course, TV people don’t want to hear any of this, but it’s almost certainly true.

Shirky ends with a fantastic anecdote that has this as its punchline:

Here’s what four-year olds know: a screen that ships without a mouse ships BROKEN. Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

WORD.

(Warren Ellis has the video here, which is worth watching.)