Social Surplus - a background

Well, here we are with the beginnings of a blog. We'll see if anyone out there wants to hear what I have to say. I thought I would start out with an explanation of where the title, Social Surplus, came from. I think it explains a little about what this blog will be about, and tells you a little about me.

My concept of the Social Surplus comes from an article by Clay Shirky (see below for link). He starts out by theorizing that during the industrial revolution, people were at first so shell-shocked by having to live an entirely new environment (aka. moving to the city) that they didn't know what to do and drank themselves silly on gin. Eventually though, people realized that perhaps the vast amount of interaction and discussion they had (the Social Surplus) could be put to better use than getting drunk - and institutions like public libraries, elections, and free education came out of the era.

Clay then says that a second revolution has recently occured with a higher standard of living and longer lives, resulting in another Social Surplus - free time. And what have we done with this free time? For a while now we have spent it on watching TV, just as our ancestors spent it drinking gin.

Enter the promise of Web 2.0.

Not only has the web allowed us to access information with an incredible speed and ease, but we now have the opportunity to use some of our free time to contribute - to give back. Clay gave two numbers in his article that I want to share:

- The entire Wikipedia project has taken on the order of 100 Million hours of effort to develop.
- The US alone spends about 100 Million hours per weekend watching TV ads.

Those are numbers almost beyond my comprehension - to think that Americans spend over 11,000 years of time watching ads every weekend! But think of what could be done with that surplus of time.

It is so easy today to not have enough time, to not read a newspaper, to not stop and help a neighbor. But if these stats are correct, it seems to me that perhaps the real issues is that we don't make the time. Not to say I'm any better - I spent a few hours today setting up this blog for goodness sake.

But I am hopeful. Because perhaps we, as as society, have reached a point where we too can move on from our distractions and use our Social Surplus to improve the world around us.


For the original article: click here