Hogarth’s Gin Lane, from the middle of the eighteenth century, has to be one of the great pieces of visual campaigning journalism.

The estimable Clay Shirky uses gin to introduce a discussion of the problem of leisure, Gin, Television and Social Surplus. You can see where he’s going (although read Peter Borsay’s neat summary here if you really want to know more about the gin craze) – the ascent of humanity from alcoholic stupor, to couch potato, to virtuous and virtual participant.

Labelling gin a technology (although cute), then skipping forward and doing the same for the sitcom doesn’t really take us anywhere, however. The result of this pick and mix history? Shirky tells us that:

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

Really? Boy, I would love to see some (old-fashioned word alert) ‘evidence’ for this.

Recall Neil Postman kicking off Amusing Ourselves To Death:

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

Is Shirky heading there with his essay?

Nope. Although he brackets alcoholism with mass entertainment, he then (without bothering to throw in time-use surveys) labels the time spent watching TV as – ‘a cognitive surplus!’ And then he really takes flight!

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we’re still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity.

I would call this the metaphysics of b$%^&*ks. Shirky lands his argument with a banal bump:

Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing.The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

Or it sure is a lot of Flickr albums.

Is online activity any more worthwhile than watching half an hour of the Phil Silvers Show? Or any more worthwhile than sitting in an audience whilst Shirky is speaking?

Is Shirky saying there is a problem with spectating and entertainment?

Well say it then! And give us some evidence – not just some flashy but superficial historical analogies, some geek-speak and a little Nike philosophy of the Just Do It school.

(Did I say I didn’t like this essay, by the way?)