The NYT’s Virginia Heffernan once came close to understanding (though she didn’t use these words) that one category of infotainment—in this case, celebrity photography—isn’t all bad.

Jennifer Aniston looking pensive occasioned a headline on her misery since her divorce from Brad Pitt. The caption drew me to Ms. Aniston’s eyes. Interesting: those part-Greek eyes, darkened by experience. What was Ms. Aniston thinking, now that she’d been left for Mr. Pitt’s costar in an action movie, the tattooed siren Angelina Jolie? So human, her hurt and expression. And so recent, I thought. I bought the magazine. …

Nevertheless, Heffernan proclaimed her guilt about indulging in what she considered a lowly pastime: gawking at celebrities.

Weakly I have hoped reading portraits in this way might strengthen some evolutionary skill, the way gossiping is said to make you better at forging allegiances.

I wouldn’t want to get all meta or postmodernist on her, but in fact Heffernan is strengthening certain skills. Media savviness may be the quintessential skill of our era. The people enjoying its advantages, if indeed they are advantages, are those who learn to manipulate the media the better to please audiences. Surely this cannot come as a surprise to Heffernan.

I also find it curious that Heffernan continues to flog her own guilt over her terminal lowbrow-ness while Perez Hilton, “the reigning online gossip maven,” one of Heffernan’s interview subjects, explains exactly how, as a practitioner, he ensnares her in the guilt trap [e.a.]:

“I took several art history classes in school, and photography,” he said in a telephone interview. “When you pay attention, you see some things that somebody else might miss, so it behooves you to try and find that special thing in an image. Then your intepretation will stand out more.”

He recognizes too that analyzing a photograph also often means embellishing it: “When I look at a picture, I go through the same process as when I look at a news story. How can I process this image to make this as entertaining as possible to my readers? I’m looking at it, cropping it, resizing it, drawing on it, making it my own.”

Despite even this acknowledgment that the photographs are shrewdly manipulated in order tap into exactly that place where Heffernan responds to the endeavor as deep play, Heffernan continues to feel guilty about her secret—until she meets another high-minded person like herself slumming at a certain online site:

[L]ast summer … I spoke to a lawyer I met on a “Lonelygirl15” message board. He and I were both obsessed with figuring out whether she was an actress or an ordinary girl.

“What do you do with your time when you’re not studying Web images?” I asked him in an e-mail message.

“I usually stick to stuff like Rathergate or the doctored Reuters photographs,” he wrote back, …“But this is fascinating.”

And that’s when it occurred to me: there is an undeniable pleasure in inferring stories from pieces of data, whether the story is trivial — “Lonelygirl15” — or substantial, like the military service of the president. Isn’t the discovery of that pleasure, in some sense, what drives science and all manner of detective work? We’re all on the Web, weighing various kinds of data we get — eBay listings, blog posts, Craigslist solicitations — and trying to read between some pixels, and connect others.

Sure, I don’t expect we’ll break any big news reading PerezHilton.com. But maybe we’re not entirely wasting our time; we’re practicing interpreting images from the new close-range, high-def magazines and Web sites. [e.a.]

Yes indeedy, we are.

Also, Heffernan should get a clue: there’s an entire area of cultural studies populated by “aca-fans,” like the MIT professor Henry Jenkins, who’s apparently being referred to as the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century.

You can check out the confessions of other aca-fans Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee on Jenkins’s blog, beginning here:

[Kaplan]: I consume vast amounts of highly denigrated popular culture: children’s and young adult literature, fan fiction, science fiction and fantasy, chick lit, science fiction television, romance novels, comics. Really, aside from the fact that I don’t watch reality television, my consumption patterns are (like many people’s) heavily lowbrow. With the exception of a few authors, I don’t read highbrow literature for pleasure, and even those highbrow authors I do read are often denigrated by the establishment for writing women’s literature, or are slotted carefully into the multicultural space available on a reading list (Jeanette Winterson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kazuo Ishiguro). When I was a child I watched PBS and A&E with my parents; now I’m fond of PBS pretty much only as the network that brought me Doctor Who throughout my childhood. I don’t listen to NPR; I listen to folk or classic rock or pop stations.

And yet I am constantly being told my tastes are too highbrow.