Medium, expanded

This post on Datacloud about what is a medium, is money a medium, and is transportation a medium has expanded my thinking about media in general. Since it's the topic my class in currently on, there will be a lot to do with it this week. I bet if my students were able to think of other things as media, besides paper-type media, and even box-type media, they might be able to do even more amazing work. I barely feel smart enough to say something intelligent about the topic now, as it's Friday, and after a week of teaching, I am now officially brain dead. I need the weekend to revive.

I have also started reading this history of computers & composition book that Gail gave me, and it's hard to read because they have a narrative, but then they have all these cool quotes in the margins, and my brain can't switch gears fast enough. I know I'm losing a lot of interesting stuff here. But I'll just include this first quote they have in the margins in my blog, because it also works really well with what we're currently doing in my class:

A revolution in communications technology is taking place today, a revolution as profound as the invention of printing. Communication is becoming electronic. For untold millenia, man [sic], unlike any other animal on earth, could talk. Then, for about 4,000 years, [humankind] also devised ways to embody speech in written form that could be kept over time and transported over space. Then, with Gutenberg, the third era began, and for the past five hundred years written texts could be disseminated in multiple copies...We are now entering a fourth era ushered in by a revolution of comparable historical significance to that of print and the mass media. We have discovered how to use pulses of electromagnetic energy to embody and covey messages that up to now have been sent by voice, picture, and text. Just as writing made possible the preservation of an intellectual heritage over time and its diffusion over space, and as printing made possible its popularization, this new development is having profound effects on civilization. (Pool, 1990, pp. 7-8)

A rather long quote, but what strikes me about it most is again this idea of time and space, and how techology deals with those two factors, and transforms our understanding of those two factors. Perhaps even the tension over technology and its inherent "evilness" is its transformation of time and space, thus critics always want to return to an earlier time where the pace of life was slower. In terms of business writing, it is a good point, because I told my students yesterday that the nature of writing has changed, but this quote is a clear historical point as to why. Interesting, interesting.