At first you may think Clay Shirky is stretching the analogy between the industrial revolution and the interactive computer experience of the 21st century, commonly called Web 2.0.  But as he continues and fleshes out his argument in the second half of the video, and especially the example of the 4 year old, I flipped my interpretation and thought the industrial revolution example may still be the wrong analogy, but because it is not STRONG enough.

if the video doesn't show, right click and click on play in the context menu.

A couple of key quotes:

On comparing WOW and Gilligan's Island:
"However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure out if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter."

Television is the "heat-sink" of cognitive surplus:
"And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. 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."

Another quote:
"I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into."

You can read the whole text at his website: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

ht: Clay Shirky on the cognitive surplus