I'm doing some reading and thinking about a class that I'm planning to offer next semester. One of the books I'm thinking that the course will include is Here Comes Everybody. It's about how the Internet has made it easy for groups to form to solve problems together. I was reading a speech given by the author and find this quote:

So I tell [a TV producer] all this stuff [about a huge debate on Wikipedia about Pluto's losing its status as a planet], and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. 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."

I laughed out loud. He goes on with some back-of-the-envelope calculations and suggests that if the internet-connected population watches 1 percent less TV that'll be enough time to produce 100 Wikipedias each year.

Andrew Keen, on the other hand, in The Cult of the Amateur is instead convinced that we're better off sitting back and letting people who know what they're doing educate, and entertain us. This user-generated media, it is argued on the cover, is (among other things) "destroying our economy." I'm thinking that perhaps what we need to do is find a way for AIG, FannieMae, and FreddieMac to be run by a bunch of amateurs looking for something to do instead of watching TV.