“Of course, O’Blivion is not the name I was born with. It’s my television name. Soon, all of us will have special names. Names designed to cause the cathode ray to resonate.”

Yesterday, Marco Sparks and Lollipop Gomez started talking television, serialized and not so serialized, and how we’ve evolved from what went before us and then Marco asked Lollipop what she thought was next. You can go back and read part one of this chat right here, or you can stick around for her response, which is…

Lollipop Gomez: I don’t think true interactivity is the way. Call me cynical, but the reality is most people don’t want to interact or contribute in a real way. Sure, you want to follow your friends and see what your friends are doing, but most of the content on 2.0 sites as one example is written by a tiny number of people versus who is lurking. My professional blog, which gets decent traffic, gets a tiny number of comments versus the pageviews that I receive. And that’s how it is for everything; people want to watch. Everyone wants to be entertained. The future, I think, is in better web content that is professionally made (or appears professionally made) and more integration of television and the Internet. I just downloaded this program called boxxee that had a big hoopla when it launched in San Francisco a few months ago, and what it does is it organizes all of your content and lets you see what your friends watched on it. I think programs like that, and also things like iTunes, which now lets you rent movies and watch TV shows is where we are headed.

As far as social networking, it’s pretty much over. No one wants to fill out a profile anymore. The status update is it. It’s all about showing versus telling — I can gauge what’s happening and what you are into from looking at your micro-blog or status update, not by reading your profile. Profiles are over.

Re: Rescue Me. I watched season 1 & 2. I really liked Season 1 because it was such a good vision of male angst and emotion. Men are so rarely portrayed on television as having much depth and it was an interesting view into that. But then, it got weird. I have to re-watch it honestly. But yes, he plays the same character over and over again.

Marco Sparks: You’re right, in that every trend I notice in social networking is… it starts and people get into it en masse and it’s heavily celebrated. It’s the new thing! We expose ourselves and then we realize that the people we’re exposing ourselves to are horrendous. You meet a few good people and you meet a few great people. Then something happens and you realize that the great people aren’t that great at all, in fact. And there’s a lot of perverts out there, not the fun kind either, and it all gets ruined. We seek a return to privacy and withdraw, claiming to be better than the machine that we once celebrated.

Then, out of nowhere, is the whispers of the new big social networking thing on the horizon and we’re all just a little more excited again…

But you’d definitely agree with me that rather interacting, we’d much rather be voyeurs?

LG: Well, it’s the cycle of being in public — at first you love the feedback and then you get self conscious and withdraw but you are hooked, so you keep doing it. I don’t even know how many “private” online journals I’ve had until I realize it’s not as fun when no one is reading.

And we’d much rather be voyeurs; I totally agree. There’s this other book, the age of the amateur, that says that our culture is dead because we have no room for professionals and critics anymore, since web 2.0 has turned us into the actors and the critics but that’s missing the point entirely. We still want to be entertained by professionals.

YouTube is another perfect example — I was on there when they first started and the original idea was that it was supposed to showcase amateurs (thus the name YOUtube) and what do we use it for now, mostly? Looking up old clips of tv shows or music videos or snippets of TV shows we’ve missed. That’s not to discount the huge cult of YouTube celebrity that has also emerged, but that’s still a fraction, right? Or it’s fan videos celebrating mainstream television popular culture. There’s still something we want to watch that we think is better.

Marco: Hence a show like Lost not only working initially, but still working to this day, I think (to take it back to where we started a bit), and still being somewhat innovative in a day and age in which formulaic procedurals and scripted “reality” shows are going strong still.

But to slowly wrap us up, I want to add that the opiate of the masses, religion, means so very little to me. Sky Bully and his zombie son represent such a desire in the majority of people to be basically told what to do and what to feel bad about, that I think you could equate it, like you were saying and quite right about, that no matter how good the amateurs are, we still like the pros. We like the people who are clearly still in charge.

And I’m not going to attack blogging here because, I mean, shit, look at us here, right? Right? I might as well go spit in the wind and then be shocked when it hits me in the face. But for all the positive and wonderful things that can be said about blogging, the negative stuff is just as true and absolutely accurate. You will find some real writers in the blogging game, but to them, it’s just a temporary plateau onto the next thing, you know? But I think I agree with what you were saying on tumblr earlier: There is writing in blogging and the best bloggers, for me, tend to be the best writers. Some people are just taking a few vapid “Bitch pleeze“s and some pictures of MS painted on coke/semen stains and throwing it against a wall and hoping it sticks (and sadly, it sticks more often than it doesn’t)(and if other people out there like that, that’s great for them), and some people are actually writing.

And lastly… our culture. Is it dead? Maybe. it’s so post-post-post-post modern now, isn’t it? But the point there is, I think it’s been dead before. And I think it’s risen from the ashes before. Television, new media, whatever. Either Bobby Ewing wakes up in the shower and realizes it was all a dream and goes about his day from there (or some variation of that last season of Roseanne) or we climb up out of the grave and dust ourselves off. We grow new skin, shed the old, and evolve for the better or worse. And I’m happy with the synchronicity of saying this, especially with this is the heavily return and resurrection season of Lost and it’s Easter, in which the zombie messiah shows up after being dead for three days and announces to his followers: “BRB!” This gross pop culture monster is a phoenix.

LG: Obviously, I can talk about reality television forever since like it or not that’s my current professional expertise, but people respond to it in much the same way. It’s a different market, though.. that’s a whole other post.

I think whoever says our culture is dead is old and doesn’t get it. There’s still a lot of good stuff being made; you just have to find it and be open to it. Just because it’s not made by the system of media (and I mean the whole system, the publishing industry, the film industry, tv, music, etc) doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. People will always want to tell stories and hear stories and laugh and cry and relate to things. There’ll be stand up comedy nights in the tent cities after all of our homes and money is completely gone.