But I did like the speech–the anecdote about the little girl looking for the mouse was pretty persuasive. As Mathew says above, it's just not a black and white issue; the changes Shirky anticipates ARE coming, they just aren't going to spell the end of television (nor does Shirky suggest they will–only that they will take a bite out of the time we spend on TV).

I don't know about Clay, but I don't think this is a binary thing where TV is all bad and the Web is all good, and social media has to replace traditional media — I think the one can extend and enhance the other. That's my hope, anyway.

Which is, of course, another way of saying that painting TV as if it were a kind of monolithic “opium of the people” is creating a straw man, just as much as claiming that using social media by necessity involves a more valuable use of your brain. I probably spend more time dealing with requests to install “Fun wall” than I do watching bad TV - is that, too, a valuable creative use of my time?

The other half of Clay's straw man is the notion that TV isn't a social medium itself. While the medium itself is, of course, one way, it has inspired massive amounts of social activity along the way. That could be just “water cooler moments” talking about the previous night's hit show at work the next day. It could be the model of TV watching prior to the “TV in every room” era, where families watched - and talked about - TV as a social group. Or it could be more directly social uses of TV, such as programmes which have ties into real-world activities and encourage people to get out and do things.

What Clay has done is basically pick the most moronic uses of TV and compared them to the best uses of social media - and surprise surprise, found TV wanting. I don't think that's social media triumphalism, but it's definitely creating a straw man designed to appeal to his audience - which is, of course, why his argument will gain a lot of popularity online.

I’m more fascinated with Shirky’s optimism that the grid will somehow rebuffer the cognitive sink rather than just automate our neurosis. The sitcom example is not the counter to the gin example. It’s an extension. In both cases we were finding a numbing alternative to the shock of the system: post-industrial London, post-War America. Today, all the grid does is automate the same instinct to avoid reality. Instead of bad sitcoms we tweet about our laundry, upload South Park clips, and constantly refresh our Wordpress metrics to watch inbound visit volume.

The grid isn’t changing how we think. It’s just changing how we think we think.