here is a lecture I gave a few weeks ago full of good ol’ lolcat:
http://www.slideshare.net/glenfuller/internet-lecture/

of course in the lecture slides you miss the awesome story about ‘collective intelligence’ and impressing girls in the bookshop when showing them my name next to Freud’s in the index of Wark’s Gamer Theory

Just to be silly for a moment, my first thought is always to simply blame America.

Maybe we can put it all down to the triumph of media effects over cultural studies in the US Academy, whose legitimacy is amplified via the interest that the mainstream media have in believing that they have effects (positive for your own medium, negative for all the newer or more electronic ones), rather than uses…

And of course the idea of ‘cognitive surplus’ only works if:

- television audienceing is a complete absence of brain function; and
- engagement with media in everyday life was and can continue to be completely weightless (so while you’re ‘not thinking’ you’re also not doing ‘anything’)

Both of which propositions (and more besides) we ‘know’ to be complete nonsense.

However, since we aren’t a positivist social science ‘discipline’, do ‘we’ (cultural studies, and the kind of media studies that has no truck with media effects) have any way of demonstrating or performing an agreed position (as opposed to lots and lots of different perspectives) that might counter any of that?

I’m not sure, and I don’t know what to do about the recurrence of these assumptions (including, as you say, in the work of otherwise perfectly sensible and quite clever scholars) other than sigh, feel despondent, and explain it all again.

But the thing I’d like to point out is that, as we know, this kind of discourse has a long history. I hope that Laura will forgive me for going back on my promise not to pile in on blogs gratuitous scholarly references But this has been noted for years – William Boddy pointed out back in 1994 that new media technologies are recurrently promoted as “active” in relation to television’s (feminised)passivity. The Gin stuff seems out of the box, until your remember Andreas Huyssen in “After the Great Divide” talking about the conflation of mass culture and the feared crowd from the nineteenth century onwards.

The “heat sink” metaphor is new, and especially horrible – crudely, reductively instrumentalising decades of global cultural history. I’m sorry, but Shirky needs a talking-to.

The question is, if we know all this, and people have pointed out so many times, why do we keep hearing it with every generation of new technology?

And why do we find otherwise sensible scholars endorsing it?