The Internet has made it possible for us to access terabytes of information from the comfort of our chairs. Today, everything from films to music to study notes (SparkNotes) to advice are available online, and are being accessed day after day. What people most look for on the Internet is content that used to be accessible only through other means. We look for the content of old media on the Internet because the 'Net makes it so much more accessible to us. And people have found ways to circumvent those pesky copyright and distribution laws to make popular content available to the masses for free.
Marshall McLuhan discussed how "characteristic of all media....the 'content' of any medium is always another medium." When the Internet was just beginning, there were no blogs, no online followers on Twitter, no online presence of anything at all. The Internet was introduced to more efficiently carry the content of another medium, specifically the academic notes and research of computer scientists who had previously (like all other scientists) relied on academic journals. The new medium (the Inter-Web) was filled with the content, and thus the essence, of a much older medium (academic research). Thirty years later, the Internet still is filled with the content of other media; films, newspaper articles, opinion articles, academic journals, and even radio programs. McLuhan would ask, "what is the content of the Internet" and we would answer, just the content of many other media. McLuhan is famous for saying " 'The Medium Is The Message' because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action." The Internet has dramatically changed the way we interact with each other, and more subtly, the way we interact with other forms of media.
David Denby's article in The New Yorker discusses how the emergence of digital music and video have been incorporated into the latest generation of portable media devices, such as BlackBerry's, Ipods, and Smart Phones. Denby talks about how old media, most notably films, are being digitized and made available to anyone online. Want to watch the latest blockbuster, there's no need to go out to the movie theater anymore, just go online and download the file onto your hard drive. "In a theatre, you submit to a screen: you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it....at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen....Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces." Especially now, the Internet is radically changing the Entertainment industry, forcing them to make their products available online to everyone, and at very cheap prices too. Denby also predicts that "soon new movies will come pouring through the Internet and perhaps through cable franchises as well, and people will look at them on screens of all sizes." The Internet has absorbed this old media and made it available to us in a completely new way.
Steven Levy's Newsweek article about the Kindle is yet another example of how the Internet, and by extension portable media devices, are sucking old media into the tech malestrom. The Kindle is made by Amazon.com, and it is a "portable electronic reading device", if that makes any sense at all. Why do we need this portable reading devices when we have books already (which i think are portable, right) is anyone's guess. One question that Levy must ask is how closely does this device mimic the 'old fashioned' book? "the real acid test was whether Kindle was capable of transporting a reader into that trancelike zone where the world falls away." Levy also describes the way in which 'books' are downloaded into this device, and the disadvantages of the Kindle to the Original. "Though the copy protection doesn't affect book-reading, it is limiting and annoying. You can't print out a passage, email it to a friend, or copy it into a document. You can't lend a book to someone, or sell it after you're finished." Basically, the Kindle is a one man only device, guard it against all enemies, whereas I just borrowed a Steven Coonts novel from my cousin last week, and after I read it I can bring it back to her without paying any fees. The Kindle is just the latest way the Internet is trying to 'simulate" good old fashioned and reliable media.
The Kindle comes as fewer and fewer people in the United States and around are spending their free time reading. Caleb Crain writes in an article titled "Twilight of the Books" for The New Yorker magazine about how we are spending more of our leisure time watching television or films and much much less reading a book, a newspaper, or even studying a textbook. "In 1982, 56.9 percent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four percent in 1992, and to 46.7 percent in 2002." The article also discusses some of the frightening trends that the National Endowment for the Arts found between a decline in reading and things like income, employment levels, exercise, and voting. Obviously, the Internet has led to this decline in leisure or investigative reading, making television programs, videos, and films available online for even the least educated web-browser to find and waste time on. Perhaps the Kindle is just a way for us to reconnect with our literate selves in a way that this generation can relate to, through an electronic portable device.
Another medium that the Internet has successfully incorporated for users is of course radio. There are a myriad of sites available to listen to, stream, or download music tracks. Radio broadcasting has always had its backbone in music broadcasting, and Internet users and innovators long ago realized that this medium was the perfect way to make music available to everyone online. Though music can be streamed online from your MySpace page or even by uploading a track onto YouTube, there have come some very interesting ways to broadcast music over the Internet. Pandora is perhaps my personal favorite, as it introduces the listener not just to your own favorite artist, but to other artists that fit into that genre. Pandora has transformed our concept of the radio station. It is "our personal" radio station now, and we can influence the playlists simply by noting whether we approve or disapprove of each song. Many traditional radio stations have created an online presence as well, to maintain their place in our society. Analog broadcast stations, my favorite being WNYC, now stream their shows live over their websites. Many of them also keep an archive of their previous shows available to online users, as well as playlists of whatever songs they play. The Internet has absorbed this medium and crafted it into its own image.
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