The Internet in particular, the great titan of new media, is a fiendishly efficient device for destroying local languages, and local heritage, and local memory. Broadcast television was also very good at this. I give television every credit for enforcing national character, and destroying local character. These backward, impoverished areas were almost obliterated by television in a single generation. But the Internet is even more powerful, because it encourages the user to talk back and take part.
Television merely floods the landscape from a central source, like a kind of paint.
The Internet appears at the user's fingertips, and seductively asks him to take part in the global world, to become a global citizen. A global citizen has very little time or motivation to learn preindustrial regional languages. In my own case, these languages would be Comanche, Tonkawa and Lipan Apache. Comanche, Tonkawa and Lipan Apache are the languages spoken two hundred years ago in my home town of Austin, Texas. I am sure these languages have many valuable pieces of data about how to skin bison, dig roots, and live off the land of Texas in huts made of leather.