Tomorrow in my media and society class we are going to pull apart the digital-Internet-online-new media revolution in a segment of the class I am calling “evolution vs. revolution.” We will spend three classes in total talking about, among other things, the evolution of “delivery technologies” and how that history may inform us (or disinform us) about the current changes in the media landscape.

We’ll start tomorrow by talking about the book as a form of media and as a delivery technology and where it may be headed. The reading is “Books are Dead. Long Live Books” by Priscilla Coit Murphy. I will also show the lengthy ad for Amazon’s kindle, which I have included below and a clip from a November, 2007 episode of On the Media which is about our affinity for paper.

The key at least inititally is for students to understand that delivery technologies have always come and gone, but the media - the printed word - has stayed. Talking about paper helps them I think see the connection between media and culture. We like paper for lots of reason, one of which is that it holds ink nicely. The On The Media piece compares it to the door hinge. Doors in the future were never supposed to have hinges, but we still use them. There’s more to it than technology. One of the reasons is that hinges make doors slammable. Sometimes we like to slam doors.