"Our media system today—the one that you and I make our livings 
from—is a descendant of the phone system only insofar as we use it for 
essentially the same purposes, plus many, many more. But the key point to 
remember is that it is totally different from the old phone 
system. The old phone system—and its technological cousin, the 
cable TV system—tanked. It crashed and burned decades ago, and we 
started virtually from scratch."