Clay Shirky is known as a "technology guru". This means that he writes about the internet. Well, someone has to. He also teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. Three years ago he wrote a book called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The heart might sink when contemplating such titles. Stuart Jeffries reviewed the earlier book which, speaking as a print journalist, he found "harrowing". The idea that everyone else's opinion is as valid as, say, that of a Guardian critic, is obviously monstrous.

Being a cheerleader for new media (and this book rings, among other things, the death-knell for the archaic understanding that "media" is the plural of "medium"; which Shirky, at his age, ought really to know) means, though, that at some point you are going to have to engage with lolcats. If you do not know what lolcats are, then you are probably the kind of person who is going to be depressed when I tell you: a lolcat is a photograph of a cat with an atrociously spelt caption designed to make one laugh out loud, or "lol". Sample: "im steelin som ur foodz k thx bai." These can be found mainly on the website icanhascheezburger.com. (How many more little bits of me are going to die inside while writing this review, I wonder?)

It is with some gratitude that I note that Shirky does not think that lolcats in and of themselves represent the best of the new media. "Let's nominate the process of making a lolcat as the stupidest possible creative act," he says. And adds in a parenthesis: "there are other candidates, of course, but lolcats will do as a general case." However, neither does he think of them as representing the end of the enlightenment project. He says that beyond the initial impression a lolcat gives, there is a second message: "You can play this game too."

Now, this is in essence the argument of Here Comes Everybody, and Cognitive Surplus is, if you want to put it like this, Here Comes Everybody 2.0. Shirky portrays a world where everybody shares information of one kind or another  sometimes very useful and important information, such as where to assemble for a demonstration. This, he says, is much more creative than sitting passively in front of a television for hours watching Gilligan's Island. "Even the banal uses of our creative capacity . . . are still more creative and generous than watching TV." Really? I would say instead that we are also grateful recipients of, say, Graham Linehan's incredible talent and creative generosity when we watch a sitcom written by him.

But there is much here that is worth taking good note of. He has thought about these issues, and he knows whereof he speaks. (Although there are the inevitable hiccups. He thinks that "followers of the Arsenal soccer team" are "continually praising the object of their affection", which shows how little he knows about football fans, or indeed Arsenal.) There is also much to take in, and he writes winningly and clearly about what his colleague Nicholas Mirzoeff describes as "the full crazy range of what people are actually interested in". Although it is funny how the phrase "the information superhighway" has been quietly abandoned. It might have died a few years ago, when the online satirical paper The Onion rechristened it "the masturbation superhighway".

Whether humanity will really be changed by the new media is another matter. These are surely different ways of doing the same things. We will still, as one ancient commentator put it, like to lie a-bed of a morning; we will still suffer loss or heartbreak or experience joy irrespective of whether we are on Facebook or not. The fundamentals do not go away. I also note  as did Jeffries in his earlier review of HCE  that Shirky has not eschewed the medium of the book, printed on paper, rather in the manner of an earlier technology. I may also inform him and the reader that the notes I jotted down on the flyleaf in order to write this review were made in pencil, something that you can't do with a Kindle. And I wrote this review with a quill pen and sent it to the Guardian by carrier pigeon. So there.r