Comments on: Media + Politics Thoughts

By: North of 49

North of 49 — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 07:54:38 +0000

It’s not just you, Sally. Me too. The reason for that, as I was told in media school, is that radio engages in a way that visual media can’t, because, in a nutshell, visual media supplies the visuals. Radio is more like printed text; the listener or reader has to do part of the work, actually contribute to the transmission of the message, by supplying in their own minds the visual images evoked by the printed or spoken words.

Remember MacLuhan? (I do, vaguely.) He said something like this: TV is a cold medium, because you don’t actually have to engage with it at all; everything is fed to you. Print and radio are hot media, because they’re participatory. If you don’t do part of the work, you don’t get the message. (Or something like that.)

So that’s why it seems intimate and special. Or so I was told.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:46:35 +0000

Telepathy, assuming the mutant-hating right does not stop its development as a medium (no pun intended)…

Sorry. The comic-book snark just popped up when I read this.

By: ed

ed — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:13:57 +0000

I’m just glad the current medium is at a grass-roots, interactive level which favors my team, and moving away from authoritarian, unidirectional talking points, which favors the Red Team.

By: SaveFarris

SaveFarris — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:03:20 +0000

The next medium? Holograms!

By: SallyMutant

SallyMutant — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 09:32:53 +0000

It’s interesting that AM radio, an ancient technology, thrived, paralell to blogs and Lib webpages.
I loves my radio–NPR and KKDA AM R&B Oldies and the crazy AM paranormal talk show stuff that’s on after the right wingers sign off.
Is there something intimate and special about radio, or is it just me?

By: jr

jr — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 07:47:03 +0000

It would be nice if the bookers on the sunday shows weren’t so biased in favor of repubs

By: Rheinhard

Rheinhard — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 04:03:44 +0000

Oh, and I can’t tell you how pleased I am that the same Lessig is an Obama adviser on tech and copyright issues

By: Rheinhard

Rheinhard — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 04:02:24 +0000

Don’t diminish pamphlets! As Lawrence Lessig remarked in his Netroots Nation keynote (check it out via his iTunes video blog or elsewhere online, it’s worth it), we have the Constitution wrong. The first Amendment says “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the blogs.” Because the blogosphere today is much more like what the founders thought of when they wrote “the press” than things like the establishment press. Todays loud and vituperative blogs are very like the pamphlets of old – brazen, scurrilous, and often wrong, but the founders trusted that out of this maelstrom of competing rhetoric would emerge truth.