Here is the video from my appearance on The Agenda With Steve Paikin on TVO last week. It was my first one on one interview on a current affairs program, which was a nice milestone.

Clay Shirky is talking about the idea of a social surplus. At the start of the industrial revolution people spent a generation drunk on gin because they didn’t know what to do with the massive changes in society, since the end of WWII we’ve been watching sitcoms.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation…And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today.

Clay calculated that the time spent to create Wikipedia was about 100 million hours of human thought. That’s about about as much time as people in the US alone spend watching just commercials each weekend. So a slight change in how we use our cognitive surplus can have tremendous results.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

I stopped watching TV (for the most part) and playing video games (entirely) a few months ago, and I feel like I’m undergoing a personal renaissance. I’m working harder than ever in my life on a project that just might change the startup industry. I’ve made leaps and bounds in the professional caliber of my work.

I’m actively studying Mideast geopolitics, Sinology, cultural anthropology, cognitive science, progressive hip hop, electoral mechanics, nanotechnology, startup business, dog psychology, alternative energy, biomimicry, mobile banking, quantum theory, third world economics, venture capital and transhumanism among other subjects. I’ve watched dozens of documentaries that have opened my world view and challenged my beliefs.

I’ve figured the first two books I want to write.

I’ve discovered a purpose and mission for that around the world trip I’ve always dreamed of taking.

Sounds crazy right? Well look at it in perspective.

Clay figured out that if the internet connected population of the US spent 1% less time watching TV, every year their collective cognitive surplus could create 100 projects the size of Wikipedia. Every year. Now your remote control is looking a little silly.

So what are you going to do with your piece of the social surplus?

Mikey and I take over the headlines!

Examples:

• “I just sent you a text message with the code and if that doesn’t work, I’ll Facebook it to you.” – The email you actually check
• “YouTube that video” – Let’s be famous
• “MySpace me” – More friends makes me feel liked
• “Twitter that” – Group page is cool if it’s pull
• “Digg a story” – Let’s find cool stuff on the internet
• “Skype me” – My phone bill is too high already

Anyone have their own examples?

Two TED Talks about mobile recently caught my attention. The first one is about how cellphones play a daily role in people’s lives all over the world. The second one is about how aid actually hurts countries and new mobile banking systems are empowering people in developing nations. When I was in East Africa last year on an exploratory mission to figure out how to design a social network to combat the spread of infectious disease, one of my huge takeaways was how integral mobile phones were to African life. So both of these videos really hit home for me.

Jan Chipchase: Our cell phones, ourselves

Iqbal Quadir: The power of the mobile phone to end poverty

On April 29 & 30th in Toronto leading investors, public & private executives and service providers are gathering to meet our country’s most innovative entrepreneurs at CIX. The conference will feature keynotes, educational sessions, facilitated & informal networking, and the startup showcase. I’ll be there to facilitate a workshop about using the web to its full potential.

There is no cost to submit and your company will be reviewed by a selection committee of over 20 leading investors. Their top rated companies will get 10 minutes to present on stage, and a guaranteed minimum of 3 meetings. It’s a no-lose situation, and if you have a business plan it should be easy to copy and paste.

There is also going to be a StartupCamp Toronto 2 at CIX, apply there too to double your chances of presenting your startup to a room full of people that can help.

This is a great opportunity to support technology startups in Canada and that’s why I’m working with Achillies Media to help spread the word. I presented at nextMEDIA, and they tapped me to help Canadian startups find out about the opportunity. I’m passionate about startups in Canada because of the high regard I hold for innovators I’ve met across this country. I hope a lot of people apply, and tell them I sent you.

PBS Frontline has a new episode called Growing Up Online, about how the internet and connectedness is changing our experience in a radical way. Unfortunately I can’t embed the video here for you to watch, but you can watch the full program online, and it’s well worth the time.

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

This documentary really hit home for me. The show opens with teens bringing their computers to a friend’s house to have video gaming LAN parties on a Friday night. That was me only few years ago. My best friends in high school were part of one of the top ranked clans in the world for the popular tactical first person shooter game Counter-Strike. One time crammed a few dozen kids and their computers into every nook and cranny of my parents’ house for a whole weekend of gaming and caffeine. We even created a website where we blogged about our mischievous teen exploits, which we thought was secure, until one day I walked into the computer room at lunch and everyone had it up on their screens. We learned our lessons at the very beginning of the adoption curve, before the stakes got too high.

I spend a lot of time working with Gen X folks, I’m almost always the youngest person in any team. At 25, I often feel closer in culture to the teenagers in this documentary than my colleagues who are 30 plus. It’s become clear to me that current education and work structures are not well prepared for us Gen Y folks and our quirks. I’m hoping that will lead us to become a generation of entrepreneurs, of game changers.

Internet society researcher extraordinaire Danah Boyd does an excellent job in the documentary at cutting through the smoke about teens online. Her research papers are a great way to dig deeper into that subject, if you want more information.

The Pirate’s Dilemma tells the story of how youth culture drives innovation and is changing the way the world works. It offers understanding and insight for a time when piracy is just another business model, the remix is our most powerful marketing tool and anyone with a computer is capable of reaching more people than a multi-national corporation.

The algorithm changed the way stories get to the front page. Now, they require more “diversity” of member votes, so a group of people can’t guarantee that their story will make the front page just because they all voted.

There’s a real problem with small cabals of people getting their content too often on the home page of Digg. About half of the front page stories are submitted by the top 100 Digg members. You only have to watch Digg for a week or two to see that groups with pet causes constantly get front page status. Look, I think Ron Paul is a sharp guy and Ubuntu Linux is really neat. But too many stories about the same subjects make reading Digg boring.

Marketers are freaking out. Some even went so far as to say that if the marketers leave Digg, it runs the risk of withering. Are you kidding? That’s absolute nonsense. Digg never needed marketers to try and use the system to get attention for their customers.

I use Digg both as a user and to share stuff that I work on, like our recent ConceptShare V2 launch. We made the front page of Digg for that story, not only because we asked our friends to vote for it. I only submit stories that I think will be interesting to the Digg community, and I took a lot of care to write the title and description in a way that would be interesting to them. Most importantly for me, I’m always transparent. Those things all add up.

It’s an open secret that Digg is for sale. I’m guessing here, but I’d venture to say that a key reason Digg hasn’t been acquired yet is their community. The Digg community is notoriously young, male and has all the charming qualities that go with being 13 and anonymous. They even had a standoff with the company (and won) over wanting to post the key to decrypt HD-DVDs, exposing Digg to considerable legal risk.

Digg needs to prove to potential acquirers that it can adapt to outsmart people gaming the system, intentionally or not. The service itself needs to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior, because the latter can easily ruin the experience for everyone. If that makes it a little harder for me to get a story I submit to the front page, well so be it.