This collection
of essays connected by the thread of media influence is an
attempt to trace the logical result of the Gutenberg Press
experience through print, telegraph, telephone, radio, television,
and internet technologies. Using Marshall McLuhan’s insights
as an impetus, this meandering tale draws upon novels, radio
and television shows, film, and trending internet platforms
and gaming to discuss the influence of media in a world increasingly
wrapped in the fibre optic cables of the technological age.
Technological
advances have always had a clear effect on the possible expressions
of culture, but those are best seen in retrospect. Now, with
the advent of the internet through YouTube, Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, and the world of gaming, the cultural shifts that
are happening beneath our feet have become difficult to see.
The stream of data has become a torrent, but its vacant noise
obscures its exact shape. This idiosyncratic examination of
those shifts is a commentary on the current of our times and
an interrogation of the eddies and swirls of cultural influence
and societal change.
New trends
such as self-publishing have utterly transformed the established
publishing industry, just as Netflix has transformed the reception
of television, online piracy the notion of copyright, the
cellphone the paper map and the camera, and YouTube the home
movie. Like a skipping stone over the growing flood of the
digital age, this study examines some of these trends more
closely in terms of what we gain as a culture, as well as
what the current leaves behind in its inexorable rush into
the future.