Category: Media / Sociology

I’m finally almost caught up with all of the news I missed while he was gone. One piece that struck me, from Entertainment [last] Weekly, was Stephen King’s article about reading a book on his new Kindle electronic reader (1/25/08). He reminds of of a saying that “books do furnish a room,” and further finds “a permanence to books that underlines the importance of the ideas and the stories we find inside them; books solidify an otherwise fragile medium.” Leave it to an author to succinctly capture that “something” about physical media.

This started me thinking about other media. Movies, for example, also can furnish a room as well as say something about its inhabitant. For me, scanning someone’s DVD collection is the equivalent of looking through their medicine cabinet. There is something about finding common movies that another likes well enough to own that seems to speed up the social connection; perhaps because of an imagined common experience or vocabulary. I’m not sure if today, books are capable of creating this type of connection (or for that matter, a Facebook application).

Music is curiously a somewhat different matter. I remember being judged by my CD collection as an undergraduate, and in years past I have spoken with a few people who like the feel of holding a physical CD and the statement that it might make sitting on their shelf. However, while my iTunes shared music has started a few conversations and I have been a long-time user of a music networking site, statistics seem to say that CDs are increasingly for geeks who care about sound quality.

What is it about music that makes some more willing to abandon the physical medium.  Is it because the ideas are not as permanent or important as those found in a book? I suspect it might have something to do with how music has become background noise for some (the white earbud syndrome), or perhaps because it doesn’t play as prominent a role in our social vocabulary as movies or books. Maybe it’s because CD spines are so small, you have to really lean in close for a look.

The founder of Wikipedia is claiming that it’s being miscast as a poor tool for education, and that “young students should be able to reference the online encyclopaedia in their work.”

Mr Wales said the site, which is edited by users, should be seen as a “stepping stone” to other sources.

As long as an article included accurate citations, he said he had “no problem” with it being used as a reference for younger students, although academics would “probably be better off doing their own research”.

I he might be missing the fact that many teachers worry about their students blindly turning to a big-name online provider without learning to first weigh the reputation of the source. With the recent stories questioning how Wikipedia grants rights to create and edit articles. And this is the point on which everything turns: who gets to be the editor?

When you think about the role of the editor in other media, it frequently emerges as what gives something its flavor. It’s the editor selecting songs and DJs that draws you in to a particular radio station, not its corporate parent. It’s the editor dictating how a news story should be framed that makes TV (or any other) news something you enjoy watching, or something you despise.

On Wikipedia, the editor is everyone. Wales and others might argue that this is a powerful way to arrive at “the truth,” but I believe it’s just as likely to cause content to loose much of its focus–that being the voice that an editor usually brings to a story. Learning to spot the impact that an editor’s voice has on information is an important part of developing information literacy, and with Wikipedia’s democratic editing, that lesson might be lost.