Earlier this month, TV Guide magazine was sold for $1 -- along with a $9.5 million loan to the buyer that made it look as if former owner Macrovision was paying to unload the publication.

The publishing industry is in flux, and the fate of TV Guide is in some ways unsurprising. Television listings are easily available online and on cable, and the chunky weekly familiar to those of us of a certain age had in fact been relaunched as an entertainment magazine in 2005.

But the fall of TV Guide, once a multi-billion dollar property owned by publishing titans like Annenberg and Murdoch, has deeper resonance than, say, the related and entirely-logical decision by your local paper to drop stock tables.

A famous observation from an earlier chapter of the digital era came from Nicholas Negroponte, who wrote, circa 1995: "The fact that TV Guide has been known to make larger profits than all four networks combined suggests that the value of information about information can be greater than the information itself."

That's still true. What's startling, even to those of us who write every day about transformative technologies, is how quickly these technologies can remake a society's long-established habits, and how even the most familiar of brands can be undone in the process.