Clay Shirky wrote a whole book about this - "Cognitive Surplus" (2011) That key bit about the person-hours in Wikipedia always stuck in my head - 100 million h

Clay Shirky wrote a whole book about this - "Cognitive Surplus" (2011) That key bit about the person-hours in Wikipedia always stuck in my head - 100 million hours to build wikipedia, versus 200 billion hours per year watching TV. And when people panic about kids amount of screen time these days, I think 'well at least it involves making choices' - which link to click, which tweet to like, which bit of candy to crush etc. Whereas in the decades that our societies spent glued to tv, a handful of massively centralised outfits somewhere got the privilege of beaming their own curated stuff straight into millions of peoples faces. They chose the content and the schedule and millions of people just turned up every day and sat infront of it. Broadcast TV is a really weird phenomenon, looking back on it from here.