Network Reconsidered

From a Colby Cosh post on the Sidney Lumet classic:

The very title of the movie has lost its emotional power. In 1976 "network" might have been a word with ominous, brutalist connotations: Lumet emphasizes this in Network with a montage of low-angle shots of the Big Three's cruel modernist facades. Nowadays, what's a network?–it's something we use for instant messaging, and to send pictures of our cats to our moms. Your fridge and your cell phone are "networked". The term, as applied to TV, has almost lost its power to signify anything at all, as it's been gradually co-opted by flyspeck content-producers out at the ne plus ultra of the cable band.