This ran in the Crikey email last Thursday.

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It must be pretty humbling to feel your power slipping away. And not just slipping away to an equally powerful competitor, but slipping away to — gasp! — ordinary people.

Let’s just say you’re the Australian head of a massive, global media company and that you’re accustomed to people doing what you say. You grew up in a social and business environment where money meant power, where media barons were the only people who could afford to communicate directly with large numbers of people; it has been this way for as long as you can remember, and as long as your father’s generation can remember for that matter. But one day along comes this thing called The Internet, promising to democratise the flow of information, and something terrible begins to happen: the plebs grow bold and start to rise up, empowered by having their voice heard, unworried about profit or business models. If you were that media baron what would you do? Would you adapt or would you atrophy?

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