This may start out sounding like a book review, but hang in there. I’m no book reader and this is still the Awareness Column.

Eric and I recently watched this talk given by Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody”. Have you seen this guy? I am not prepared to defend everything he says about a coming Information Revolution and the Industrial Revolution which preceded it. What I do want to touch on here is two questions that he left me asking myself for the last two weeks:

“Where do people get the time (to be on the internet)?”

“What is the value of that time?”

In his talk, he tells the story of a conversation he had with a reporter about Wikipedia specifically and the amount of man hours that have voluntarily gone into the Wikipedia information sharing community. The reporter marveled at the volume of time spent and asked Shirky, “Where do they get the time?”.

Before he could say his answer I had already asked myself the same question. I spend about two hours a day on the computer. Where do I find the time? My conclusion was the same as his, “Television”.

I used to watch television for the full length of the kids’ nap time and I would flip it on the instant their darling heads hit their pillows at bedtime, only turning it off when my own head hit the pillow. If I am being brutally honest about my television viewing habits, I watched it a lot. Even more honest? I can’t tell you very much at all about anything I watched.

Somewhere about the peak of the reality t.v. boom, I lost interest in what was on. The internet had formerly been my standby in case there was nothing *good* on television. Things changed and I found myself spending more and more time reading blogs. It wasn’t long before I had a blog myself and found that there is a lovely community of actual people ready to discuss and even debate just about any topic imaginable at any given moment.

My television sat silent and my computer whirred as I did exactly what Shirky says I would: I joined the community and participated even as I was confused as to what the whole point was exactly.

Shirky ascertained that we are in a period right now of finally getting our heads straight with this huge leap in information availability. He suggests that we are holding our own so to speak in this new environment and are now able to manipulate it to further create and evolve our society.

Because I am a blogger, I listened to Shirky’s thoughts and wondered the future holds for bloggers when we finally figure out what we are doing here. There is value to the information so many of us are offering and receiving.

The very fact that you are reading this right now says that you have some interest and connection to blogging and the internet. What do you think? Is blogging simply an entertaining hobby? Or is it the shift in societal thinking that finally puts the proper face on the “every man”? Do bloggers have a responsibility to the public they report to? Is there a revolution? If you think there is, what is the blogger’s role?

Categories: Awareness
Tags: blogging, communication, information, questions