C'mon ER. TV is a medium with a broadcast (centralized) architecture and fairly high cost of entry, and thus for decades a favorite tool for propaganda and control by governments the world over. The Internet is a highly-decentralized medium that's more amenable to point-to-point realtime communication than massive broadcast streams, and the equipment to build it is dirt cheap and globally ubiquitous. The Internet is fundamentally unlike TV because it's a tool that fits comfortably in the hand of an individual.

And thus we've observed in the wild people using the fine-grained communications facilities of the net to plan and execute political action that has toppled old nation-states a gratifying percentage of the time.

When have we ever seen people use television that way?

What "Global Village"? McLuhan didn't imagine anything like this. As I've said elsewhere, what I see forming isn't a monolithic global village, but something quite the opposite: A myriad of virtual communities occupying and interpenetrating the same global space. A club for everybody.

Bad sequels or Vogon poetry, the wheel turns and the bearings wear out.

We're such a cheery lot today.