of gin, tv and wikipedia

Here's a thought: do you feel that 24 hours a day is insufficient? Well, a major time-waster of the modern age is the television set. If you can get yourself away from all that serial-watching (oops, double-entendre unintended), you will have so many more hours to spare on other tasks.

Watch the video above of author Clay Shirky in great talk at a recent Web 2.0 conference, on how people find time to do stuff like editing Wikis. He makes a case that people are just learning how to deal with the "cognitive surplus" of free time modern life affords us. We're waking up from the "collective bender" of mindlessly watching sitcoms and instead, we're choosing instead to spend our free time volunteering, interacting, and Web 2.0'ing online.