I suggest you to read this great post on HereComesEverybody: it is about Gin, Television and Social Surplus.
This excerpt is** illuminating**:
For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
And again:_
In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”
At least they’re doing something._
I will definitively buy Mel Blake’s book: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations