Behind the Technological 8 Ball

How do you people keep up with all of this media technology? I feel a bit like I’m behind the curve in understanding all of this. Now that I’ve hit 40 I’m having a harder time keeping up the technological Jones’. In Warren Ellis’ Bad signal this morning he profiled something that was shiny, PDF-Mags. It reminded me of something I did as a kid. Remember Zines? Those one sheet hodge-podges of original poetry, writing or art or whatever slapped onto an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper and copied on a Xerox machine then dumped in various public places? Those who were really hard core had their own mimeograph machines.

I work for a major media company and I have the pleasure to work with some amazing creative and smart people who are using and thinking about how media is distributed to the audience. There seems to be more outlets than you can shake an MP3 at in getting content to the masses. I think it’s great that your ordinary  Netizen can create whatever floats their boat and share it with Aunt Myrtle or the Editor of the New York Times. All of this is great but one thing that keeps sticking out like a sore thumb is the quality of the content. Or shall I say lack thereof.

In college I read a slim volume called Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman. He makes it clear that we should put the technological brakes on until we figure out how all of this new fangled poppycock is going to effect culture. I remember as a bright dewy-eyed young man thinking, what a kook, technology all speed ahead. Now I’m not so sure.

 We are all bound by time. There are only so many hours in the day that we can consume media and if I have to wade through little Jessica’s YouTube recital or the latest volume of Jackass I am left jaded and despondent over the expression of art and culture in this time and in this place. I turned off regular broadcast television several years ago. I’m a big public radio nut but have turned off the news portion because it’s too depressing. I have a Netflix account and by talking to my friends I get to find out what I should be watching. This puts me about a year behind my other consumers. The tradeoff is I have the time to sit and think while the rest of this technological buzz continues at a deafening level. My colleague who’s an online producer says that any post of more than 450 words and you start to lose audience. I’m over that now so I’ll wrap with a question. How do you consume your media? What’s good or important to you? How do you wade through the dross?