Television may be the gin of the information age, but that doesn't mean the web is pure water The new media revolutionary in me so much wants to believe Clay Shirky's " Here Comes Everybody " hypothesis, that the web heralds a new era of mass participation, collaboration and creativity. With our mobile phones and broadband connections we remade society, so that my five-year-old son cannot conceive of a world without the web ("Daddy, if people didn't have computers, how did they buy things from the Internet," he once asked.) We are the generation that Changed Everything. How cool is that? But then my inner history graduate rebels. I'm innately suspicious of anyone who says human behaviour has changed fundamentally. The joy of history is in its humanity, in all the stories that show how our ancestors were ordinary people who laughed, loved, tricked and schemed just like we do today. If Baby Boomers claim they invented sex, just refer them to Roman pottery and the satirical cartoons of the 18th Century. And so I believe in our bright human future: that so long as people survive, they will behave much like their stone age forebears. The context may be different, but people are people across time and space. And that's a Good Thing. So I'm deeply conflicted when, on the blog accompanying his book, Shirky launches a puritanical attack on television as a sink that dissipates our thoughts, and compares it to the socially sedative role of gin in