Evelyn Rodriguez over at Crossroads Dispatches (who graciously hosted us on Carnival o' the Capitalists a few weeks ago) has some really interesting things to say about media. My only problem is that they're usually couched in erudite academic terms that make me feel like I'm stuck back in a philosophy seminar class in which I'm barely staying afloat. Really important stuff, but not something you can breezily skim while trying to pretend you're paying attention on a conference call.
Like today's discussion of "networked media": Very supportive of our concepts.?I think.
My takeaway-- in a quote from Word of Mouse: The New Age of Networked Media:
McLuhan's "message" [as in 'the medium is the message'] is roughly equivalent to what in this book I call "programming," and I agree with his famous axiom, but with a critical difference. Corned beef is corned beef (the programming or the message), but it affects our taste buds differently oon rye bread (one medium) than on plain white bread (anotehr medium). The medium and the message have equal impact in reconfiguring human cognition; for linear and interactive mass media to date, McLuhan's tenet could read "the medium is the masculine message."
Contrast networked media like the internet with television: television is a masculine, paternal "take-what-I-give-you' medium; whereas the internet is nonlinear, interactive, and community-oriented, and infinitely deep and mysterious. Networked media like the internet are feminine in nature. Programming each requires a different composition of literacy. Networked media are shifting the balance back toward the feminine...
This evolution is reflective of a shift in the culture from the profoundly masculine to the sublimely feminine - a swing in the balance of power between the different halves of human nature, one that businesses and media programmers will have to heed, consciously or accidentally, to be prosperous in the networked age. The change has nothing to do with political correctness. It's something much broader and authentic. This shift in viewpoint will likely be as profound a human development as the transition from the Middle Ages to the Age of Enlightenment...
The advent of these new media is pulling society back to a more centrist position - a balance of the two sets of characteristics. Institutions would like to relinearize our behavior and relinearize media itself. It is in their nature to do so. They were born from a masculine template...
Networked media like the internet are capture (masculine) and nurture (feminine) media. In traditional media, for example, an oligarchy of sorts has controlled the programming. In networked media, oligarchies don't work. Networked media require programmers to listen to and engage humanodes [humans that are nodes in the network]...
That's a good thing, right?
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