How social media is turning viewers into value contributors - on a mass scale | Social Signal

I don't quite understand the excitement behind this insight... It's not exactly new. Yochai Benkler in Wealth of Networks writes: "A billion people in advanced economies may have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them, every day. In order to harness these billions of hours, it would take the whole workforce of almost 340,000 workers employed by the entire motion picture and recording industries in the United States put together, assuming each worker worked forty-hour weeks without taking a single vacation, for between three and eight and a half years!" The Internet (and not just social media) is all about leveraging that free time by lowering the transaction cost of sharing the products of that free time. It also serves as a spur to more free time being directed towards the production of more shared public goods on the Internet in a nice virtuous cycle. I thought everyone knew this?