As I foreshadowed in my article Why Game? I got interested in this idea of the Social Surplus.

While I was looking through the numbers for how much time was spent playing games I was shocked to say the least. 10,000 hours is a hell of a lot of time and as Chris pointed out, 10,000 hours would be about right for the required amount of time to become an expert at something. That amount of time though was dwarfed by the amount of time spent watching TV.

I always knew people watched a tremendous amount of TV. When I found some statistics though I must admit I felt slightly ill. The Nielson group released the following figures. In the first quarter of this year the average for people aged 25-30 was 144 hours a month, which spins out to be a shade un 5 hours a day. 5 Hours a day!? Jesus Christ. In the five years between 25-30 we will average 8,500 hours.

As the age bracket creeps up it just gets worse. When we finally hit 65+ we are watching around 7 hours a day. That is such a disgustingly large amount of TV.

Where does my term of Social Surplus come from though? Well that’s exactly what this TV viewing is. I would argue that using that using this time to play games is more, if only slightly in some cases (Looking at MMO’s here), productive. Watching TV is basically a time sink, you get nothing out of it except the fleeting enjoyment that is gone the moment you stand up. It is lost time. Again as with games I understand people need to relax and unwind, but for 5 hours a day?

To put it into numbers that we are able to relate to lets have a look at Wikipedia. We all know it, we all use it, we have an understanding, if shaky, of just how massive an undertaking it was/is. Lets say using their page of what has been done and doing some dodgy numbers we come up with 150million hours of collective human effort. Everything, every article, every edit, every language, we would be talking in the ball park of 150million hours of effort.

Now let’s look at the amount of time that the age bracket of 25-30year olds in America spent watching TV in one year. Call it 22Million people (going on rough data here) at 4.8 hours a day we end up with:

38,544,000,000

That’s for one age group. Each year. Spent wasting time in front of the TV. That is the equivalent of over 250 Wikipedia’s every year. That’s a complete and whole new encyclopedia of all human knowledge every two days! Being pissed away watching American Idol.

Getting people to do any form of work is difficult. The only reason most people have a job is money, not enjoyment. The reason Wikipedia worked is that anyone could spend any amount of time on it they wanted and straight away get something back. It extended itself and said “Look, the tools are here, help yourself”. Anything that can do that will work; we only have to look at something as stupid as, say, lolcats. It extends the idea of “look, if you have a picture of a cat and large Helvetica Font you can participate”. And people did, in droves. It is a meme that has still not totally died.

People no longer expect or even accept media that does not extend itself to them. Whenever I read anything on the internet I now instinctively spin to the bottom and read the comments. The only reason I still read Slashdot is for the comment. Even here I changed over my blog to WordPress because it had easy to use comments.

I believe the next big thing; the next great advancement will somehow involve harnessing this massive amount of social surplus and funneling it into something else. It will require a rethinking of the almost all forms of media. Any form of news story that I cannot comment on? Not interested.

As I said finding a way of channeling this surplus is key. A project like Wikipedia was a great idea but there are hundreds more. How about a relationship mapping chart? You would start from you and input all the family links that you know of. If it got large enough you could travel down those links to see who else you are connected to. As long as it had a simple interface and an inviting look it could work. Or a hyper local news site where you could jump in to your local area and read what is going on or post what you have seen, specials down at the local café, road works on this side street.

The possibilities when you start thinking in these numbers are amazing. What else could be achieved?