I loved this. Firstly, for the way that it illustrates how digital literacy and marketing hype each pivot on their association with youth. And, additionally, how it captures the frustration of so many employees currently staring down centrally-funded promotion strategies that invite us to extend our brand presence on to every conceivable platform.

But I also love it for the way that the script – in fact a succession of scripts this season – expresses a wider “structure of feeling” about mid-career, white collar job insecurity. I know it’s against new media protocol to admit watching the show, but this downturn-inflected season will be an ongoing reference for me in terms of illustrating what economic anxiety looks like in popular form.

And whether or not you buy that, I’d love to hear from anyone who can confirm whether the Twitter scene was actually product placement. It would certainly come in handy for the chapter I’m writing about internet politics, Shirky-style.

Some people will have seen that one of UQ’s most respected television scholars made the editorial of Brisbane’s Courier Mail on Friday, after giving an address to The Sopranos conference at Fordham University this past fortnight. Terry Flew has a fitting response to the story here. This kind of thing is par for the course in cultural studies, and if conference attendance is now gaining the same scrutiny as ARC funding in the tabloid press, I should probably prepare myself for Melbourne in November where I’ll be presenting a co-authored paper called “Ordinary Australians? Aspiration, commodity fetishism and masculinity in Underbelly”. I can only hope for the same amount of column space Jason’s work received.

But coming on top of Jill Walker’s effusive synopsis of this talk by Clay Shirky, I’m starting to wonder how many other people believe the claim that watching television has been the ‘collective bender’ of the 20th century; that we are only now just starting to wake up to the vast cognitive surplus that television (and previously gin) consumption has ‘masked’. According to Shirky, who laments the many hours he spent watching Gilligan’s Island as a kid, television sitcoms have been the social lubricant of the past century, ‘without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise’. He finds it regrettable that ‘every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list’. He also argues shows like ‘Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat’.

I don’t even know how to engage with this last statement, but as I wrote in response to Jill’s post, it seems incredible to me that this kind of rhetoric is necessary to say why Web 2.0 is new or different or important. The argument that ‘it’s better to do something than to do nothing’ is spurious and lacks all context; nor does it reflect what we already know about the ways people use and manipulate and engage with broadcast media. Previous mass communication theories may well have characterised television as a one-to-many platform–what others might choose to describe as a ‘sit back’ versus a ‘lean forward’ medium. But even these approaches overlook the realities of domestic media consumption revealed over decades of cultural studies: how it is so often a background companion to the routines of household labour, when it isn’t an excuse for many subtle and explicit forms of relationship building, or a closely observed entertainment platform with its own rituals and rewards for interaction.

Shirky’s argument does a disservice to those involved in developing and improving genuinely useful online endeavours by pitching their efforts against the platforms available to creative people in previous generations. He also pretends there hasn’t been an evolving sophistication in television production and consumption. Shows like The Simpsons have demonstrated this for many commentators in the past, but Ugly Betty, My Name is Earl, 30 Rock and Extras do the same for audiences today.

Relating the leisure pursuits of a small minority of educated and highly networked early adopters to the prospect of far broader social empowerment seems to imply that being able to make a lolcat is a step towards taking control back from the structural constraints of everyday life (ever tried explaining a lolcat to someone who doesn’t read blogs? i.e., still the majority of people? It will give you a sense of the significance of these ‘typical’ examples of online literacy). The notion of ‘cognitive surplus’ in leisure time actually risks taking capitalism’s productivity and efficiency imperatives to new extremes, part of the pernicious influence of the Getting Things Done industry as it enters the private sphere. But the complicity of Web 2.0 celebrities with capitalist logic is worth a book rather than a blogpost.

Perhaps the thing that remains inconvenient for the current bunch of web prophets is that unlike internet access and participation, television is cheap. Poor people can watch it, and those that do so regularly ‘consume’ television in ways that are as sophisticated and as knowledgeable as people who currently hold the cultural and educational power to manipulate present forms of media production and performance.

I bet that if you asked those who aren’t online regularly what their idea of ‘participation’ meant it would incorporate their work, their friendships, the support they offer their families and maybe also the sporting team they play in or follow. In short, banal civic activities within a recognisable public sphere that television also serves. To them, using the internet to make the most of their time after all those commitments have been met might well be a bizarre notion.

Shirky points to an optimistic future. He cites the wisdom of a four year old who is habituated to having a mouse attached to her screen as evidence for the naturalness of interactivity. His inspirational conclusion is that:

We are going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?”

Like the DIY ethos of other prominent bloggers, this kind of language troubles me, and I’m not sure how best to argue with it. So for the moment I’ll just focus on that the same little girl Shirky refers to. I hope that despite the seductiveness of new media, she will also be allowed to indulge in the most time-wasting and apparently passive of all communication platforms, the novel. I hope that she may grow up to recognise the echoes of Steinbeck deployed in the passage above. I hope that knowledge allows her to contemplate how America’s subsequent affluence has been distributed unevenly. And I hope that she will be able to discern the unique brands of spin that currently feed new and old media alike, regardless of the screen she’s using.