What is lost is social networking. Texting or calling people you already know isn't networking.

Every social network experiences convergent evolutionary pressure driving it to become social media instead.

Everything is being lost. We're in the process of sacrificing our collective humanity for corporate profit.

> Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.

The problem is, running broadcast networks is insanely expensive. You need either a lot of antennas (or other distribution points such as coax and fiber) around the country, or you need insanely large and power-hungry antennas (i.e. AM radio), or you need powerful data centers and legal teams.

Someone has to pay the bill, and so it's either some sort of encrypted pay-tv which most people don't want to pay (see: the widespread piracy), or it's advertising, or (like with social media) venture capital being set alight.