Reading: Barker [Media]

Barker claims in his 2003 volume of Cultural Studies that, "no other medium can match television for the volume of popular cultural texts it produces and the sheer size of its audiences." Perhaps Barker didn't own his own Apple computer and had a dial-up internet connection when he first published his text at the turn of the century, but a little less than a decade after Barker was typing his original manuscript on his Commodore 64, the internet that Al Gore invented is now the cultural medium of choice that drives popular culture.

From MySpace to Facebook, YouTube to IMDb, Google to Yahoo!, the World Wide Web is the medium the current information age and popular culture as a whole has turned to for the majority of their entertainment. I'm sure Barker's next edition will remove this chapter completely and replace it with musings about how the internet is now the most important cultural medium, but until then, there are three reasons that I will use to prove my point.

First, the recent Writer's Strike. The WGA holding out for a new contract demanding higher returns on DVD sales & gross sales were significant, but not as much as their demands for a percentage of internet viewing, distribution and advertising sales. People watch television shows online now more than ever, so much that to combat Tivo and DVR nearly every network [except, of course, a predictably slow CBS] has their shows and content available for viewing on the internet minutes after airing [an example of a video from SNL is embedded at the bottom of this post].

Admittedly, cable and satellite providers are more infused than ever into households across the globe... but online communities like MySpace and Facebook are where young people spend the majority of their social networking browsing for countless hours each day. YouTube can spark overnight pop culture sensations with uploaded videos ranging from both the extremely talented to the lowly pathetic. And "google" is now a word in the dictionary.

Finally, the world is now wireless. Technology is driving down the information superhighway faster than tech companies can produce new toys for consumer demand. More of my friends watch the seemingly quarterly Apple keynote address that Steve Jobs gives online than I know watched the SuperBowl. We are living in a digital world. I just hope the Master Control Program from TRON never becomes a reality.