Clay Shirky doesn't like television. The Chronicle's Jeff Young reports this week that the New York University scholar and Internet guru figures Americans spend 200 billion hours each year of their thinking time—or time they could be thinking—on sitcoms and their ilk. He also figures that all of Wikipedia took about 100 million hours of thought to produce. So Americans could build 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year just by writing articles instead of watching television.
He does like reading, however. In an interview online in The Atlantic, Mr. Shirky says he starts his day checking Twitter, then moves to an RSS feed reader to check sites like Al Jazeera (his favorite for world news) and tech sites like Boing Boing. Then there are books and magazines and newspapers and NPR. But in general, Mr. Shirky says, "there's no real breaking news that matters to me. I don't have any alerts or notifications on any piece of software I use."
To read the full, original article click on this link: How Clay Shirky Spends His 'Cognitive Surplus' - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Author: Josh Fischman
