You're emphasizing two key things.
First is the notion that technologies have been characterized as either a threat or, I would say also, as a panacea. A key message today is that in and of themselves, they're neither. It's how they're used, what they're used for, and so on; that's where we have to get the emphasis.
My sense, at least, is that like everything, they can be used in ways that help us, ways that do not help us at all, and so on. My sense is that all the dire predictions miss the fact that the issue is not the technologies in and of themselves; it's the use they're put to. And I think your examples indicate that.
The other thing I think you're also suggesting is the context of what the economists would think about it, supply and demand. Demand is back to ideas and behaviour: people demanding. If people are demanding, then the supply side starts to react to that. It's a question of trying to think that through in terms of the new media and the examples today.
My sense is that the new dynamic we're really wrestling with is the ease now of horizontal connecting and how we do it. Certainly in the past all the issues you pointed to were there, in the 19th century in those debates about how the different media would trump each other. It has turned out that in fact we're reading newspapers today. They're threatened, but we still have them today. They became popular in the 18th century. When TV and radio came in, no one was supposed to read any newspapers anymore.
It seems to me that the issue is back to how the different technologies fit into people's lives, why they want them, and what they are doing with them. It's about the content of them, how they are using them, and so on. That's the issue.
The focus on the possibilities of use is really at the heart of a lot of the legislative challenges. The actual technologies themselves have been changing so rapidly that this focus, it seems to me, is in some sense less important than the focus on why and how people are using these communication devices.