In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky proposes the idea of “cognitive surplus” — that automation gave us an enormous amount of free time to think and cogitate, and that sitcoms and other light entertainment from the past century were a way of absorbing that surplus, something we’re just shaking off now.

In a talk, he compared Wikipedia, which represents the cumulation of about 100 million hours of human thought, to television watching, which absorbs about two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.