A fine essay by one of our leading media thinkers. He reaches for the grandeur of his essay "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" (see Links) and falls short. Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile read on the slow-motion collapse of the television business.

Well written. But Mr. Shirky – please, please, join the rest of the blogosphere with LINKS!

This is a decent opinion piece. It might have benefited from citing Jared Diamond's work as well as the others.

What a novel and interesting piece of writing! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. The premise is that complex systems fail catastrophically rather than gracefully, in part because culture has evolved to value the complexity so much that it doesn't see any other way of getting the job done, whatever the job may be. So the choice becomes doing it the old, complex way or not at all. A current example is how the ease of creating amateur video and other media is affecting current commercial models of media - it's so easy to put up a simple video and, by the luck of the draw, having it go viral, that the most watched video in the last 5 years is not some blockbuster movie or TV show, but a short clip of a baby biting his brother's ... More »