By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
I’ve got an essay in the new issue of Nieman Reports on how technology enabled me to revive “Little People,” my 2003 memoir on raising a daughter with dwarfism — online at first, and then later as a print-on-demand paperback.
And yes, you can buy a copy. I’m so glad you asked.
Today is the 100th birthday of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian scholar who forever changed the way we think about media and their effects on the human psyche.
Last week I sat down for a conversation with Len Edgerly, host of “The Kindle Chronicles,” on what McLuhan would think about the Kindle, the iPad, and what effects e-readers would have on our perception of text, reading and linearity. The interview grew out of my recent review of Douglas Coupland’s McLuhan biography for Nieman Reports.
Len and I had great fun, and I hope you’ll have a chance to give it a listen.
Could Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann have thrived in the days of fuzzy, black-and-white television sets? It’s a question I found myself asking after having introduced myself to the work of media theorist Marshall McLuhan earlier this year.
The result — my review of Douglas Coupland’s quirky “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” — appears in the new issue of Nieman Reports.
The O-and-O question comes about from McLuhan’s definitions of “hot” and “cool” media. To McLuhan, writing in the 1950s and ’60s, radio and movies were “hot” media because they were all-encompassing, leaving little to the imagination. Television was “cool” because the flickering images were so inadequate — that is, television was a participatory medium, forcing the viewer to fill in the missing information and thus requiring his active participation.
Thus, according to McLuhan, hot personalities who did well on radio were failures on television, which favored bland, soothing folks upon whom the viewers could project their own thoughts and desires.
In one of his two major works, 1964’s “Understanding Media,” McLuhan seemingly anticipated today’s flat-panel HDTVs, writing that “‘improved’ TV” would no longer be television as he understood it. My guess is that if McLuhan were alive, he would tell us that the talk-radio style of television that works on cable would have been a failure before technological advancements made it easier for the viewer to just sit back and vegetate.
Not to get carried away — after all, “The Beverly Hillbillies” was popular when McLuhan was writing — but one interpretation might be that the harder you have to work, the less willing you are to be told what to think.
I’ve got an essay in the current issue of Nieman Reports on the evolution of media criticism, from its roots in the work of A.J. Liebling and the alternative press to its current status as an Internet-fueled growth industry.
The essay is, in part, a review of a new book by the media scholar Arthur Hayes called “Press Critics Are the Fifth Estate: Media Watchdogs in America.” Hayes deliberately eschews journalistic practitioners of media criticism such as Jack Shafer, Howard Kurtz, David Carr, Eric Alterman and Liebling himself in favor of political activists. (The cover aside, Stephen Colbert and even Jon Stewart receive surprisingly little mention.)
Hayes’ argument is that activists from ideological organizations such as Accuracy in Media on the right and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on the left are more likely to bring about change than those whose mission it is to report on media institutions and write about their findings. As you might imagine, I disagree. I write:
At its best, media criticism — like all good journalism — is about digging out uncomfortable facts and telling them fearlessly. It is difficult to do well and, it shouldn’t be the critic’s job to bring about change. Truth is a rare enough commodity that it ought to be valued for its own sake.
Hope you’ll take a look.