At this year's CES, the real news was neither shiny nor tiny. The question in the air was what people will watch, listen to and do with these machines now that they are becoming interchangeable and interconnected.
Old-line media companies' fears can be lumped into three nightmarish categories:
¶ Business-model anxiety. Will paid download services undercut TV advertising?
¶ Creative anxiety. McLuhan is out. The medium is no longer the message.
¶ Control anxiety. The long tail is in. The career prospects for hit makers, gatekeepers and even fact checkers may well be in doubt.
The lesson here is that on MySpace there is no distinction between personal and mass media.
