Word: media
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...drifting to cable and going online, the formerly mass networks are losing money and cultural clout. Next fall NBC will give Jay Leno five hours of prime time a week because he's cheaper than producing Medium. Programmers and cultural critics are warning of the end of the mass-media era, when shows from I Love Lucy to Seinfeld joined tens of millions of Americans in a common experience...
Broadcast's new enemy is digital media, including venues like Hulu that were created by the networks themselves, which cut into their ad dollars. Last year Heroes creator Tim Kring gave a legendary rant about how viewers using TiVo or DVDs or downloading - legally or not - cut into the show's audience, leaving "the saps and dips____ who can't figure out how to watch it in a superior way" to watch live TV (which still counts most for ad dollars). In one sense he was right, if undiplomatic. But only half right, because technology also makes it possible...
...irony of the nostalgia for TV's "golden age" is that it romanticizes the very things people used to condemn. Mass media were once homogenizing; now we miss how they unified us. Culture critics once said TV appealed to the lowest common denominator; now cable's ambitious niche shows cater to élitists. Some even romanticize commercials - commercials! - as making TV for the masses possible...
...still want to read quality journalism, still listen to recorded music and all the rest. And so as some of the huge, dominant, old-growth trees of our economic forest fall, the seedlings and saplings - that is, the people burning to produce and sell new kinds of transportation and media in new, economic ways - will have a clearer field in which to grow...
...always some signs of hope and potential advances on other fronts," says Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher with the New York-based Human Rights Watch. "But recently the good news has been very few and far between. There has been a total lack of progress on legal reform, the media, rural reform, labor. These issues were very much carrying forward hope for opening up of Chinese society, but now there's just nothing on the horizon." (Read "China Takes on the World...