A belated, heart-felt thank you to the 2nd cohort of UBC Foundations of Digital Media. You were great individually and as a group. Which makes teaching easy and fun. And hopefully does something similar for learning. Your presentations and papers were terrific.
Obviously we were helped by the times we are in, where news about digital media is ubiquitous in our lives thanks to…(wait for it)…digital media. Conflict of interest, tautology, or something else? However you want to understand the media-on-media phenomenon, it probably isn’t exactly what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said that the “medium is the message”…or was it?
On this last McLuhan-esqe question let’s just say that as a former media executive nothing irks me more than media which is self-referential. For example I hate when sports reporters tell inside stories about other sports reporters, or talk-show hosts think anyone wants to hear about their conversation with a cab-driver that morning or what party they went to last night. Those things are so self indulgent and undisciplined, not to mention that 99% of the time no one “out there” is or should be remotely interested.
Yet weirdly that is where we seem to arrived on a grand scale structurally – the place where digital media cannot escape itself. The truth is that media was never objective and never could be – but we took comfort that it seemed to want to pretend it was. The sheer post-structuralism of it all seems overwhelming – perhaps giving rise to the notion of “false news” for those who driven to avoid the complexity and confusion.
All of which to say there is no likely end to the meta-debates we have navigated. What we can control are the values, and tools of analysis, we personally bring to the party. My fondest hope is that the course in some way helped you with those.
Don’t be strangers. Would love to hear what you are up to from time to time.
Jon
