Media universe: In 1995 there was no Fox News Channel or MSNBC.

#WTF.

That’s right. It was the three broadcast networks, PBS, and CNN. And there were three vibrant, profitable, and thought-leading weekly magazines: Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report (where I worked from 1998 to 2000). National newspapers were potent and powerful, and devoted pages of coverage to the shutdown’s twists and turns. Local newspapers also fed off the story and quizzed congressmen and senators about the implications of the shutdown, the politics of spending cuts, and this epic collision of personalities—Clinton’s and Gingrich’s. Editorial pages carried real weight, and lawmakers trembled if the hometown paper wagged a finger of disapproval. Time is still here, but its circulation has dropped from 4.2 million in 1997 to 3.3 million in 2011. Newsweek died, and my beloved U.S. News remains, barely, as a scrappy, readable website and tout sheet of colleges and hospitals. Newspapers across the country are crinkled husks: Total daily and Sunday circulation as a percentage of U.S. households has fallen from 60 percent in 1995 to 38 percent in 2010. Hometown editorial pages are quaint whispers in the roaring Internet wind.

Speaking of the Internet, in 1995 it was an oddity. Globally, Internet traffic totaled 0.18 petabytes in 1995 (a petabyte is 1,000 to the fifth power).

In 2011, global Internet traffic rose to 27,483 petabytes. The point is, 1995 was a paper-and-network-TV world. Hell, it was a wristwatch-and-fax-machine world.