Now the Tacoma enthusiast can find and interact with every other 14 year old who thinks the fusion holds some interest. The minority of two can critically mass at several hundred. I can t think of a better illustration of this new narrowcasting than Art Bell s radio program. This is spectacularly rich, uncontrolled by corporate or marketing agendas, and produced as almost a one-person enterprise . One man can make a mark.
Journalists are agents of plenitude as well.
They create a hothouse that sustains even the most fragile of new species. Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson helped create the 60s with strategic observations. As we have noted, Wolfe actually helped define the beginning of the 80s with The Right Stuff and then helped declare its cessation with The Bonfire of the Vanities . Both the discovery and the species proved decade defining. No 19 th century naturalist worked harder in the tall grasses of Africa or the rainforests of Brazil.