Has Nora Ephron Killed the Internet?

I'm pretty sure something is going to happen to this business. That we've come to an end of an era. That the movie Julie & Julia is the signpost and, as well, the agent, of the end.

The last time Nora Ephron made a movie about the Internet, it may well have marked the beginning of the end of AOL. Nora's own view is that You've Got Mail, a significant hit for Warner Brothers in 1998, helped grease the way for the Time Warner-AOL merger that was the downfall of the online service.

I tend to think Nora's contribution to AOL's demise was even more direct and meaningful. She created a nice, sweet, family-style AOL. Where, in reality, AOL was a vast enterprise of sex chat rooms, she turned it into a walk in the park. After Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks got their mail, everybody in America--including everybody's mother in America--got an AOL account. Not long after everybody's mother joined AOL, all the sex chat people began to leave. Nora chased sex from AOL out onto the Internet. Treacly wholesomeness and general mass market media sentimentality is a kiss of death in the digital world. It killed Yahoo, with its cloying efforts at stickiness. It's why Microsoft, with its middle-of-the-road sensibilities, never got any traction. And why MySpace, with its let's-be-cool desperation, died.

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