This almost crosses over into "Old Man Yells At Cloud" territory, except the author is self-aware of how easy it is to become a simple complainer without peelin

This almost crosses over into "Old Man Yells At Cloud" territory, except the author is self-aware of how easy it is to become a simple complainer without peeling back the surface to understand how we got here. Credit to Ed Zitron for taking the extra step. There was an excellent interview with LeVar Burton once (I can't remember where, it might have been on NPR's Fresh Air) where he talked about the significance of the TV miniseries Roots, in which he starred. One key thing he mentioned is that Roots was one of the last shows that one could credibly assume "everyone with a television saw at least some of it." Because it came out right on the cusp of the explosion of cable television into the mainstream market and HDTV after it. For a specific generation of Americans, Roots is a common touchstone exploration of the grim history of slavery in the US. Recreating something like Roots today (something with both the wide reach and willingness to shine light on ugliness of the story) would be almost impossible. When there were a half-dozen stations to tune in, a message on them was seen by "everybody" (because even if it made you feel uncomfortable, what were you going to do if you had rabbit years? Tune in the wiggly-lines nightly news? Turn the TV off?) But with dozens and then hundreds of stations, that is no longer true. For all the complaint about consolidation of social networking, the Internet has had a massively-disintermediating effect on media (entertainment media in particular, but also news and technical; most people may get their basic facts from Wikipedia, but all other online sources of basic facts are exactly the same distance away from the consumer). It has become drastically harder, far more expensive, to get a message to everyone now. The "filter bubble" is the other side of the coin to the broadcaster's modern dilemma: if something actually is important, how do we get it in front of people?