My favourite sentence in there: "Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat." - Martin Bryant

Great article with some good points made extremely clearly - Iphigenie

I love how it reinforces my optimism. Shirky says, "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." And that's just the US -- as a globe, we don't have to do much at all to make huge strides. It reminds me of how optimistic I get when I think of how inefficiently run almost every business is. It also reminds me of the Paul Graham article about start-ups that I read earlier today--where he talks about how much harder the average person can work--if they're able to get a reward for it. Wikipedia editing provides a non-monetary reward, as does friendfeed--satisfaction is creating something that others can possibly benefit from. Thanks for posting this link, Joelle! - Steve Koch

this speach on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch... and http://www.youtube.com/watch... and - Björn Brembs