My good friend Sten Carlson just pointed me toward this: from Jodi Dean’s fairly excellent (if slight unfortunately named) Blog Theory:

Blogging has been associated with murder and death ever since the mainstream media starting [sic] noticing it (around 2002). Just like video killed the radio star, film killed vaudeville, and television killed bowling leagues, so did blogs allegedly kill journalism and mainstream media, replacing these with idiots and amateurs who failed to check their facts and ranted about their pet issues (as well as issues with their pets). There’s a constant underlying all this killing–corporate power. Even as some media forms eclipse others, global conglomerates profit from the innovations while pernicious arrangements of state power benefit from a diverted populace. Television can’t deliver the requisite eyeballs? No problem. Switch gears, locate other sites to capitalize. The dominance of capitalism as a system requires changes in industry; innovation drives capitalism. State forms adapt as well: disintegrated spectacles allow for ever more advanced forms of monitoring, tracking, and surveillance. People plead for more cameras to keep them safe as they shop and happily relinquish personal data in exchange for saving a few cents here or there, for shaving seconds off this site or that (Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive [Malden MA: Polity, 2010], 39)