Really New Media

Prepping for the new semester, making improvements to the website students use to access readings, links to viewings and assignments this week.

Peaceful and calm, as the season is upon us, and we enjoy family and friends near and far.

It's hard to see the outline of every pebble from the window of a speeding train, and so it is for me as I watch the mediascape as my students and I travel through time together.

I started teaching in the 1980's when we used textbooks. No DVD's or VCR's in the classroom, no cell phones in students pockets. Presentations were on poster board using cut-outs from magazines and newspapers. Now my students have their own You Tube channels and most feel utterly comfortable using multimedia software that I can't even start up.

We teach in Mass Communication about the industry that I began working in during the 1970's in radio, television and the newspaper in Laredo, Austin, and San Antonio.

Today that industry has effectively been eclipsed by the Internet, in the manner of all mass media, according to McLuhan: the new kid on the block adopts the programming of its predecessor (radio did it to vaudeville, TV did it to radio) and the beat goes on.

Seth Godin, however reminds us that it is more than the-beat-goes-on, because the Internet is a game-changer.

McLuhan might have thought of it as a return to life prior to the invention of mass media, when our stories weren't for sale or selling something (the commodification of information).

Here is Godin from his post today:

"Lifestyle media isn't a fad. It's what human beings have been doing forever, with a brief, recent interruption for a hundred years of professional media along the way. That interruption is fading away, and lifestyle media is resurging. People publish. Instead of denigrating user-generated content (what an obscure way to describe human stories), marketers need to understand that this is what we care about.

We shouldn't be surprised when someone chooses to publish their photos, their words, their art or their opinions. We should be surprised when they don't."

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/12/the-most-important-page-on-the-web-is-the-page-you-build-yourself.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29

Next to TED Talks, I count this writer as having the most valuable perspective on the Internet. I am encouraged and grateful for the impulses we humans have to share using media, whether via text, video, or the next platform.