In Progress

Just finished reading excerpts by the granddaddy of media studies, Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s revolutionary idea was very simple–divorce content from medium and investigate the medium, and it becomes easy to see how much more of a lasting impact the introduction of a new medium has on people than the collection of content passed through that medium. Thus the influence of the medium always far exceeds that of the content passing through it.

This article about the impact of electronic textbooks is a great illustration of McLuhan’s idea that the medium always trumps content. Here, we are ostensibly dealing with a whole host of issues ranging from the economics of essential products and the companies that sell them, to copyright issues, the rising costs of education, and open source learning. In fact, all of these are issues because of the newly extended world we now inhabit made possible by digital distribution. We are just beginning to grapple with the changes to education and how we view authorship that have been initiated by digital tools and formats.

One of the specific ideas this article touches upon is how the “rip, burn and mash” philosophy of the digital music world is penetrating other realms like academia. I’ve noticed that the term “mixtape” has been revived from its premature demise as a nostalgic activity amplified through technology to become revolutionary. Mixtapes were originally too limited in range to revolutionize the music industry, let alone any other, and so a whole generation in the 80s developed a taste for democratic sharing and a feel for pastiche as a way of inventing a new product before content sharing became ubiquitous. The mixtape is in many ways a signifier of a new kind of ethic for the digital age, and we’re all already under its influence. If this article is any indication of where we’re headed (and I think it is), I doubt the people fighting the mixtape revolution are going to win out.

Posted on September 15th, 2008 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Global Culture, Media, Music, Participatory Culture, Politics, School, Uncategorized