Though we exist in a time of great media upheaval, where the Internet has made available so much story for so little effort, millions are still drawn to long-form traditional narratives. We still go to the cinema, the bookstore, the concert, the play, the big game, the event. Though so much power can be packed into a media snack – a tweet, a blog post, a text message, a sentence, a word, or even an acronym (LMAO anyone?) – we still sit down for super-sized media meals. Something must be inspiring us to pull up that chair and sup from the old media table. Inspiration seems to be the answer. What is the importance of inspiration to storytelling? In our digital world – full of bombardment from massive narrative abstraction and fragmentation, where so much story content is being communicated in so many bits and bytes and packets like bullets from a fiber-optic Gatling gun – we still find time to stick the old media morphine drip in. This happens when we do something so archaic as watch an hour-long drama on network television, spend nine innings at the baseball stadium, or, gasp, read an entire Harry Potter book cover-to-cover. Read more…

Posted by Hanson Hosein:

We’ve often discussed how we’re witnessing the death of industrialized, mass media. For those who might recall, this top-down form of communication, involved massive technical resources, high barriers to entry, and a captive market of millions of eyeballs. Network TV, in particular, reached its peak in the 1970′s with ratings grabbers like “Roots,” “60 Minutes” and “M*A*S*H.”

Now this interesting article, “Broadcast Networks Under Siege” notes that the disastrous May “sweeps” [begins] “to look like a signal moment in the slow, painful meltdown of the broadcast-TV industry.”

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