David Brooks in NYT about the communications aspect of the current economic crisis:

To me, the most interesting factor is the way instant communications lead to unconscious conformity. You’d think that with thousandsof ideas flowing at light speed around the world, you’d get a diversity of viewpoints and expectations that would balance one another out. Instead, global communications seem to have led people in the financial subculture to adopt homogenous viewpoints. They made the same one-way bets at the same time.

From a system perspective, communications work to synchronize various elements of the system. Under general information overload, people tend to synchronize on what attracts immediate attention, which nowadays is infotainment rather than information. Therefore, the latest financial bubble can be considered as one of the consequences of rapid media/internet growth. I would argue that in a similar pattern another major economic downturn, the Great Depression, followed a major communications breakthrough, radio, and the emergence of mass media.