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“Music collections always replace each other and radio always tends to be yet another choice,” he says. “Satellite didn’t kill FM. AM didn’t kill FM. (Streaming music) one more choice and one more device you can listen to the radio on.”

digital is an important growth area for the business, even if the $17 billion or so that advertisers spend on radio each year is slow to move over to the Web.

In 2012, Clear Channel made strange bedfellows when it joined forces with Pandora to lobby Congress to lower the rates their services were required to pay artists to stream their music online. The companies eventually backed down from that effort in order to focus on a different political tact.

Online, people “tend to have a favorite and then they bounce around a couple different services,”

This equipment gave the NSA unfettered access to large streams of domestic and international communications in real time—what amounted to at least 1.7 billion emails a day, according to the Washington Post.

First, the government convinced the major telecommunications companies in the US, including AT&T, MCI, and Sprint, to hand over the “call-detail records” of their customers. According to an investigation by USA Today, this included “customers' names, street addresses, and other personal information.” In addition, the government received “detailed records of calls they made—across town or across the country—to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.”

It works like this: when you send an email or otherwise use the internet, the data travels from your computer, through telecommunication companies' wires and fiber optics networks, to your intended recipient. To intercept these communications, the government installed devices known as “fiber-optic splitters” in many of the main telecommunication junction points in the United States (like the AT&T facility in San Francisco). These splitters make exact copies of the data passing through them: then, one stream is directed to the government, while the other stream is directed to the intended recipients.

In April 2012, long-time national security author James Bamford reported NSA is spending $2 billion to construct a data center in a remote part of Utah to house the information it has been collecting for the past decade. “Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases,” Bamford wrote, “will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’

Netflix is like an indulgent parent – offering unlimited sweets without any responsibility on the child’s behalf. Subscribers are spoiled with the model, gratifying themselves on a whim by binging new releases without regard for any psychological implications that may take place. American culture now expects instant gratification: fast food, instant messaging, instant streaming. There is virtue in patience, a virtue Netflix disregards in the name of better serving the consumer. Unfortunately, faster service does not always equal better service.

When network shows are stripped of commercials and sent to Netflix, the viewing experience is somewhat hollowed. Audiences have grown more used to this with TV on DVD and the restructuring of story beats on premium cable channels, but many comedies still require room to laugh and dramas room to breathe. Binging on Netflix turns distinct three-act episodes into an elongated 13th-act behemoth.

Conversation becomes stunted or clandestine, which eliminates much of the buzz that builds pre-season – buzz that is necessary come June when Emmy voters fill out their ballots.

Television executives have a right to be both frustrated with and terrified by the advent of the Netflix model.

Original shows ushered in using the Netflix model, like House of Cards and Hemlock Grove, have cut out the advertisers. Netflix functions as the network, and if the company decides to evolve from simply licensing original programming to actually producing, they’ll be the studio, too. Netflix is making all the money, monopolizing our attention and making poor consumers out of its subscribers. If this model becomes the norm, the producer/advertiser relationship will be pushed to the breaking point.

The folks at Netflix have little to fear. House of Cards executive producer Beau Willimon, in a recent Q&A for Vulture, responded to a question regarding the Netflix model and said, “Our show simply gave people the experience they had already grown accustomed to on Netflix — viewer empowerment. People like being able to decide for themselves when, where, and in what quantities they will watch their content.”

We’ve seen how this user-driven, consumerist approach has transformed the music industry into a shell of its former self.

What is the informed television devotee to do? Netflix is not inherently evil, and at only $8 a month, the access to vast libraries of programming is an invaluable asset. The answer doesn’t lie in unsubscribing from Netflix, but rather in promoting the traditional broadcast model. By watching live, conversing with friends, coworkers and strangers on Twitter, and even purchasing overpriced merchandise from beloved shows, TV buffs everywhere can help keep the industry afloat. In the hands of the responsible, Netflix is a mighty tool for good. In the hands of the ignorant, it’s a weapon that could destroy all television.

But what happens once Netflix reaches the point where profiting only on its own original programming makes more sense than continuing to pay licensing fees, which will skyrocket as the studios jack up prices due to diminished on-air returns? Netflix is positioning itself as its own network, assembling a lineup of programming that will survive the inevitable scripted network TV apocalypse. And once the people lose instant access to former network favorites like How I Met Your Mother and The Office, they’ll rebel by cancelling their subscriptions, the fees will also increase as competition is defeated. But by that point the damage will be irreparable – both television and Netflix will be dismantled by the impatient viewer.

rarefied and highly specialized skill, would all of a sudden go viral

Not because I don’t like magazines. In many ways, I like them better. But they’re too grounded in space and time, too organized and linear, too collaborative and professional to deliver the synaptic frisson available from the stream-of-consciousness image blog.

A friend of a friend calls his addiction to sites like these “avenues for procrastination,” but I think there’s something else involved. Like other forms of pastiche — the mix tape, the playlist, the mash-up — these sites force you to engage and derive meaning or at least significance or at the very least pleasure from a random grouping of pictures. Why not dive into an alternative world full of beauty and novelty and emotion and the hard-to-put-your-finger-on feeling that there’s something more, somewhere, where you’re not chained to your laptop, half dead from monotony, frustration and boredom

So maybe we are like the rats, and what we’re seeking while idly yet compulsively cruising Pinterest is really just the reliably unpredictable jumble of emotions that their wistful, quirky juxtapositions evoke. Maybe that is our rectangularity.

This is, I think, what these sites evoke: the feeling of being addicted to longing for something; specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing.

frivolous and feminine

People don’t post stuff because they wish they owned it, but because they think they are it, and they long to be understood, which is different.

In fact, the company discourages people from posting images they have created themselves, preferring that they venture out into the wilds of the Internet looking for beautiful things to bring back to the cave.

“Curation” does imply something far more deliberate than these inspiration blogs, whose very point is to put the viewer into an aesthetic reverie unencumbered by thought or analysis. These sites are not meant (as curation is) to make us more conscious, but less so.

But products are no longer the point. The feeling is the point. And now we can create that feeling for ourselves, then pass it around like a photo album of the life we think we were meant to have but don’t, the people we think we should be but aren’t.