"We all need to be part of something larger than ourselves, " says Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and author of The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation.

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Wielding a black Magic Marker, he charted the big bang of channel expansion and audience fragmentation that has propelled television history so far, from the age of the three networks, each with a mass audience, to the hundreds of cable channels, each serving a niche audience twenty-four-hour news, food, sports, weather, music and on to the dawning age of Internet video, bringing channels by the tens of thousands.

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