Loss of standards?
Digital media have conspired to make more media more accessable to more people - sharing and communication is now commonplace between social groups spread worldwide, in a way that old media could never have supported. This is a good thing, but also a bad thing...
The quality of commonly-accessible digital media (jpgs, MP3s, pdfs, etc.) is often worse than the media they have replaced (notice I am not including FLAC, RAW shot in a 39 Mpix digital camera, etc.). As such, we as a generation are getting used to reproduction standards that are in some ways worse than what we had a generation ago - your common compressed MP3 played through iPod headphones sounds worse than a good quality turntable hooked up to a vintage 1970s hifi with good speakers. But as it is "digital", we think that it must contain all the data that should be there, and we learn to relish it's ubiquity.
The upshot of this is that we are getting more media shared wider, but our appreciation of the nuances is dissapearing. When you look at a friend's holiday cameraphone snaps on Facebook, it will never have the granduer or impact of vacation pictures taken as 35mm slides and projected on a screen in the living room while you all sit down and drink wine and discuss them. You will never see the fine details on Facebook, notice the background of the pictures, the expression of the faces of those in the back, the whitecaps on the water behind them, etc. You WILL get a top-line impression of what was going on - the central thought, as it were, but not the complete context, or the mood, or the complete emotion.
As a result, we are more and more drowing in media saturation, with ever lower expectations of what it should or at least could be. Photography especially is more and more about conveying a very simplistic thought, rather than an appreciation of the photograph itself - after all, it's silly to worry about the "rule of thirds" when the entire photograph is only a 2" square of pixels on a monitor.
The only good news is that digital photography is also making DSLRs and processing more readily accessable to those that would persue it as a hobby, and as a result the "serious amatuer" ranks are swelling slowly but surely. The only question is whether people will still care to view that type of studied photography for long...or appreciate it.