MediaBerkman

Few dispute that the web will be the dominant medium of the 21st Century – swallowing whole newspapers, books, radio, television, and the cinema. And even as the web grows virtually – over a trillion unique urls and growing – it shrinks physically – from laptop, to netbook, from cell phone, to even tinier and ubiquitous communication devices.

The growth of the web seems radically different from that of television, radio, and newspapers. It seems like it was so grassroots, so rapid. But Professor W. Russell Neuman of the University of Michigan argues that to predict the growth of the web in the future we need to take a good hard look at just how those 20th Century technologies and infrastructures came to be so dominant.

So, what does history have to say about how this tiny little medium will grow?

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CC-licensed music this week:
Neurowaxx: Pop Circus
General Fuzz: Warm Steel

The Reference Section:
Russell Neuman’s bio
Russell Neuman’s research
Russell Neuman’s recent talk Theories of Media Evolution at the Berkman Center

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See a partial transcript after the jump.

Have you checked your media consumption lately? In the 20th century we monitored our consumption of media through the hours spent in front of the television, the number of movies we saw, the number of newspaper articles and books read. The specific quality and type of content absorbed through those mediums didn’t make many headlines, but the numbers did, as researchers and parents alike saw their families spending astonishing amounts of time consuming television.

The web has made research on media consumption astonishingly more difficult. You could be doing almost anything on the web – from the aforementioned tv watching, book and newspaper reading, to activities you might also do in real life, like shopping, gaming, and chatting with friends.

And the web follows us almost everywhere now, in the form of smartphones and laptops, chasing after us like a puppy begging for attention. You might say the web has integrated media consumption into our lives so seamlessly to become almost indistinguishable from any other daily activity.

Still, the quantity of information we are exposed to, and how we are exposed to it, can tell us a lot about how we engage with society. Russell Neuman, a Professor of Media Technology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has done quite a bit of research on this. He stopped by Radio Berkman to explain the evolution of how we interact with information.

 http://www.lsa.umich.edu/umich/v/index.j…

Russell Neuman is a Professor of Media Technology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. You can find out more about Professor Neuman, links to his work and recent talks, and to an archive of all Radios Berkman at our website, blogs.law.harvard.edu

This episode was produced by me, Daniel Dennis Jones, with David Weinberger, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 http://www.lsa.umich.edu/umich/v/index.j…

 http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/lunc…

Neurowaxx Pop Circus
General Fuzz Warm Steel