One of my information sources is a blog called Information is Beautiful. So when that blog visualized one of Clay Shirky's soundbytes from his already blogged about new book, Congnitive Surplus, I was enthralled and am, therefore, because I care about you, dear reader, passing that link onward to you.
As Information is Beautiful is a blog about graphics, there isn't any text to support the graphic, so I'll fill in here.
The large cyan square to the left is the amount of time adults in the US spend watching television. The tiny cyan square to the right of the big square (Can you see it? There it is.) Is the amount of time it took to create Wikipedia. Thus, the concept of Cognitive Surplus whereby we can get things using our heads without much of an opportunity cost at all. As Mr. Shirkey's book points out, this doesn't mean that we'll do anything useful or pretty with all our free time, but there is that possibility.
