Hah. That's great. I'm reading Little Brother right now and enjoying it. :-)

Possibly-useful technical comments -- I could have done without the dramatic music on the intertitles, which was much louder than the interview audio, and, speaking of which, the audio on the interview was rather too soft for me. I turned the sound on my computer all the way up and could still just barely hear them talking. (Which is what it's all /about/, right?)

It's worth noting that, while sitcoms were produced assuming passive consumption, the viewers weren't always being passive -- the extensive fanwikis of today are only the latest manifestation of fans appropriating and building on "passive" entertainment. (See also fan fiction, just for starters, which was around long before the Internet.) Even viewers of fairly formulaic TV shows like Law and Order develop complex relationships with the characters in them. Even small variation in the presentation of the characters over time gets layered, again and again, in kind of a palimpsest, building something much more complex in repetition than could ever be built with a single, extremely nuanced presentation. (Have you ever watched a movie over and over, finding more in it each time? The same thing happens with successive episodes of a television show.)

Ironically, I've found that when -- as I have lately -- I want an easily-discretized form of entertainment which is engaging but not too engaging, the Internet has me watching more television than I used to and not less. Partly it's about the people I'm around in real life and watching what they watch so I can share it with them, and partly it's about television finally starting to produce things I find it worthwhile to watch (ie. longer story arcs and more character depth), but mostly it's about Bittorrent making it easy to find the good stuff in a way that's viewable on my own terms. I'm engaging with the stuff I watch in all kinds of ways, though, and the Internet makes it much more a two-way street.