To illustrate where I’m going with this, I’ll provide a very simple example. You’re surfing the net and you come across a very funny video. You happen to have a blog, so you decide to blog about it and include an outbound link to the destination site with the video. I like to call this type of hyperlink to media a “microchannel”, and guess what? What you just did made you a media programmer… just like the ones in Hollywood! Now, multiply this behavior by another 100+ million bloggers and users of social networking sites like MySpace. What you end up with is a growing collective of millions of media programmers developing a massively distributed and decentralized media guide comprised of a gazillion microchannels. Bye, bye TV Guide.

In short, social media is rapidly decentralizing and democratizing the act of programming media out to the edges. As a result, I believe that traditional network programming of channels will be replaced by social media programming of microchannels. So if you can imagine a vast army of uncontrollable media programmers storming the gates, you’ll start to understand why Hollywood is so fearful of the Internet. After all, losing that kind of control is a threat unlike anything they’ve ever seen, and it’s one that goes to the very heart of power in the media industry.