Paradigm Shifts

Sometimes it's good to know you're not alone.  People who are suffering through hard times often need to know that there is someone else there with them.  Sometimes, as in the case of a lot of country and blues songs, just hearing a ballad about someone else having problems can soothe your angst. Germans call it schadenfreude: rejoicing at the misfortune of others, I love Germans they've got words for just about every twisted impulse of the human soul.
Thus it is with some glee that I observe other large institutions having the same sorts of problems adapting to the world as the church.  Especially, since one of the institutions is one of the biggest idols of the modern age: television.
Recently, a dispute between Time Warner and CBS caused certain cable systems to black out CBS's coverage of the US Open Golf Tournament.  Oh the tragedy!  Just imagine all those traumatized golf fans having to miss out on the drama... or they could just go on the interwebs and follow/watch there.  Which brings me to the subject of paradigm shifts.  There have been a lot of them over the centuries: hunter-gatherer to agrarian, agrarian to industrial, analog to digital etc.  However those shifts seem to be happening faster these days, and we barely have time to amass a decent collection of DVD's before Blue Ray comes along and sends us into a new binge of consumerism.
Big, ponderous institutions like the church, and TV networks, have some trouble adapting to changes that come on quickly.  Some have credited the invention of the printing press with starting the protestant reformation; the Roman Catholic Church, by virtue of being the only ones with access to expensive, hand copied Bibles, had virtually cornered the market on the Word of God, then Gutenberg's little stampy thing gave certain industrious folk the ability to mass produce the whole thing and then distribute it to every Tom, Dick and Harry who could read.  Then it started to get translated into other languages by ne'er do wells like Erasmus and Martin Luther, and people seemed to like it.  They liked to read all these stories they had heard so much about, but it created a certain problem for the Church, because apparently they had grown attached to doing a bunch of things that weren't in the book.
This oversimplifies the situation quite a bit, but it illustrates the danger of ignoring or underestimating paradigm shifts: there comes a point when a lot of people will see behind the curtain and realize that they don't have to buy your nonsense any more.  Oligopolies like Time Warner do not like it when people knock over their sandcastles and they will go so far as to lobby for actual laws that protect their hegemony.  There are many such laws that "protect" those poor, vulnerable, global media conglomerates from all those nasty people who want to take their stuff away.
Funny thing about the interwebs though; they were more or less started by people who didn't much care for rules.  Contrary to popular belief, notorious stuffy white guy Al Gore did not invent the internet.  It was rather a collective of scruffy nerds who would rather spend hours on things called BBS's arguing about whether Han shot first or playing D&D with people in Turkey, or chatting with people they thought were girls, but were probably not.  When the digital infrastructure improved to the point where it could handle graphics and sound, pornography took over and pretty much ensures that the interweb will always be a thing.
Meanwhile, in the "real" world, other people started discovering the non-pornographic potential of the internet. Amazon, Facebook (which is really just a BBS updated and used by a bajillion people), and Google have become forces of nature.  The free exchange of so much data eventually gave people the idea that they could just share stuff, and thus get things for free.  Napster was the first big fish in that pond and it wasn't too long before someone, namely the heavy metal band Metallica, started crying foul.
Now, as a child of the punk/heavy metal era, and as someone who once owned an astonishing collection of copied cassette tapes, piracy is sort of a way of life.  When I went to a Metallica concert in high school, part of the appeal was that they were dark and bad and angry, to have them all of the sudden become spokesman for the recording industry and start whining about how these nasty file sharing villains causing them to have to sleep on smaller piles of cash, I was a bit disappointed.  Napster was like shangri la to a music loving twenty something with no money and a high speed internet connection.
I understand that artists are entitled to make a living, rather than just giving their stuff away, but the regulation of file sharing just basically gave big media conglomerates a way to get their fingers in more pies.  I really don't think that it did any good for the struggling musicians out busting their butts to make a living.  It did, however, mean that Lars Ulrich got even richer and Time Warner (there that man again) got even more richer.
At this point you're probably wondering how I got from Gutenberg and the reformation to Napster and Metallica via computer nerds and porn, see how disorienting paradigm shifts can be?
Imagine then, if you're an institution that has experienced major success in an old paradigm, whether we're talking about the RC church in the middle ages or Time Warner in more recent years.  All of the sudden it seems like people are increasingly suspicious of your motives, when all you want to do is keep them out of hell/ offer them quality family entertainment, which are pretty much moral equivalents.
Alright, let me take my tongue out of my cheek now, because I could really go on being sarcastic about the corporatocracy for quite a while.  What I want to say about all this is that everything changes, except human nature.  No matter how awesome our technology gets, someone is always going to figure out how to get insanely rich off of the next new thing.  Unless we get to a point where we cross the Star Trek line, where humanity finally decides to get it's act together, scrap the whole use of currency and pool our resources to start building awesome spaceships, we will always have to deal with the old gods and idols making a ruckus about the new gods and idols moving into their turf.
Actually, that's rather more amusing than watching Tiger Woods lose another major isn't it?