I saw two videos this week that struck me. The first one I saw on Life Hacker by a man named Clay Shirky. The lecture he gave was titled Gin, Television and Social Surplus. In this talk he addressed the issue that I’m sure a lot have people have raised which was “Where do all these people find the time to spend online?” Seriously. All the Wikipedia entries, YouTube videos, Diggs, MySpace profiles and everything related to Web 2.0 are produced mostly by people that are generally just bored. [Click here to view]

Shirky basically states that (and this is a vast over-summarized version – you should really just watch the video) people find the time by social networking when they would normally just watch TV or listen to the radio.

That being said, is this an improvement? Is blogging, YouTubing, Googling, Wiki-ing and general social networking better than watching television?

Most people might say “Yes”, “No” or “Really? Who cares?”

At first I thought it was an interesting discussion but I was indifferent nonetheless. It didn’t really strike a chord until I saw this video published by Wikipedia: [Click here to view]

There’s an image in this video that stood out in my brain. A woman in a third world country reading a Wikipedia article on Vaccines.

Now I’m not going to make the dramatic jump from social networking to world peace, but it does bring up an interesting point. The flow of information has vastly changed in the last decade. Television is unidirectional. Whatever they tell us, we have to listen or turn it off (…or fast forward – but you get my point). With Web 2.0 comes the ability for 2-way media. Not only does information come to us, but now anyone with an internet connection, the know-how and a little boredom can give it out. It may be something as simple as a photograph showing my trip to the East Coast. But it’s there. And whatever small dent it makes on this massive collection of information that is readily available, the more our flow of information grows.