Zoey raises a key concept in the entry about Ariana Huffington. Certain people and ideas gain or lose influence because of media form.

This has to happen extensively. Extreme cases will probably be obvious: for years deaf people couldn't use phones; dyslexia is considered a handicap primarily in alphabetic cultures. Likewise, not all messages travel equally in all media. Most people consider a poem or song more appropriate for a confession of love than, say, a table of data, a pie chart, or a formal essay with MLA style works-cited page attached.

It seems inevitable to extend to perhaps less obvious and more critical circumstances. Noam Chomsky and others have pointed out that 30-second TV or radio soundbytes tend to squelch dissent. One can quickly express an opinion that shares the audience's assumptions because one needn't repeat the groundwork, but if one must reform those assumptions, one needs time.

Class responses to McLuhan got me reminescing about the infatuation with broadcast media, particularly with TV, in the middle 20th century.

The hype for radio in the early '20's and even TV in the late 40's shows that some people entertained similar hopes that these media would democratize information. I wonder to what extent centralized ownership; profit-driven, MOR, least-common-denominator programming; softcore news and so forth are inherent results of broadcast per se, and to what extent these are results of the largely successful attempt by a few corporations to control production and distribution.