Likewise, before the Hollywood studio gained ascendancy, local theaters decided for themselves what films to show. And of course before the telegraph, newspapers were necessarily local. In this sense, cable television’s undoing of the mass, or national, media culture was merely the undoing of a transient twentieth-century invention. In the nineteenth century, as now, there was little common information for any two randomly selected American citizens to discuss, even if there had been a water cooler.
