A Shallow Idea Visualized

David McCandless at Information is Beautiful has a graphic visualizing the fact that US adults spend 200 billion hours watching TV, while it only took 100 million hours to create Wikipedia. He introduces the graphic thus:

I was listening to writer Clay Shirky talk about cognitive surplus – the idea of spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed.

I cannot believe that Clay Shirky would be so self-centred (not in the sense of vanity, but rather of lack of ability to see the world from others' perspectives) to believe that all those people watching TV would rather be spending their time under high cognitive workload, such as editing Wikipedia articles. I know that when I watch TV, it's because I don't want to think.