Monday Night, Medium (Rare)

In having the opportunity to talk with fellow education/library professionals on ideas instigated from Postman et al, I am glad to be able to have a sounding board for my own musings, as well as to hear others' point of views. Our dialogue encompassed everything from first time blogging to dilemmas of how much to reveal or discuss on our blogs to high school musical to cheetahs to marketing insinuating its tentacles into different aspects of our lives.

Through our verbal interchanges, we revealed just how quirky our thinking is and how most of us are still working out our theories and evolving our beliefs on the order of things. And of course we do so not in a vacuum, but in the world. We do so in the medium of our modern times.

The process of integrating Postman's themes into my own daily thinking/living takes some doing. For example, when he writes that new mediums "changes the structure of discourse", I don't disagree, but I do wonder how this impacts upon my own experience and history. Then I have to ask myself "Have I already been acted upon by the "new medium" without my knowing because I take it for granted and cannot view it with objectivity?" So is it me thinking what I think, or is it the new medium telling me what to think?

Or maybe the new medium is like the Golem. The Golem, a creature conjured by a rabbi to protect his people in a Prague ghetto, becomes increasingly uncontrollable, goes on rampages as the rabbi loses control over it.

Okay, maybe that's too melodramatic...