Before I can go on to comment on Viola or Laurel I need to think through something about McLuhan. Several weeks ago as the New Media Faculty Seminar at Baylor met to discuss Marshall McLuhan’s articles in The New Media Reader Gardner Campbell told us about a class session that helped students understand McLuhan’s contention that medium is the message. He told the class what happens in out typical language game when I say “pick up a hammer”? Go ahead now think of a hammer in your hand. Now that you have visualized this now describe for me what you have. The student said immediately you have a hammer being grasped by a person. You have a hammer in your hand. Gardner said an emphatic no to this. “What you really have is a hammerhand! The tools becomes an extension of the person in this case the hand!” My words cannot capture Gardner’s verve and enthusiasm.

The appliance as the extension of the person a la Doug Engelbart and McLuhan’s the medium is the massage/message brings us back to a new appreciation of the “appliance.” Sherry notes the dangers of anthropomorphism of our devices. These devices were also mentioned in The 2010 Horizon Report from New Media Consortium and the Educause learning Initiative. The key trends include 1) the proliferation of resources and relationship due to the internet. 2) The idea of on demand has hit the television and bleeds into other aspects of life including technology. 3) End users seem to be warming up to the cloud services such as Google Docs and the around the corner Windows Live. 4) Students treat their education as increasingly a collaborative fashion contrary to the earlier era.

The Horizon Report list includes critical challenges 1) the changing role of the academy including 2) new and emerging scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and research lags behind the technology. 3) Digital media literacy continues to find new importance in every field. Finally 4) a contracting economy has given rise to more focus on key goals often absent advancing new media research.

The Horizon 2010 reports the technologies to watch. The report names two near term technologies, that is to say, within the next twelve months, mobile computing and open content. Baylor has worked to position itself well in terms of mobile computing. Baylor is a Microsoft campus. Therefore open source software cannot get a substantial hold here. There is an open standards conference here every year.

The second adoption horizon, that is to say two to three years out that the Horizon Reports mentions are electronic books and simple augmented reality. I want to use Brenda Laurel to explore the electronic book. The Baylor library has started a collection of electronic books. However there has been no substantial rethinking of the concept of the e-books. What if we take Laurel’s reading of Aristotle (Poetics).

When so many of the writers we have read this semester have imagined the books would reside in the Memex machine and the Dynabook but they did not speculate on how that shift of books from artifacts of the Guttenberg era to an entity out of the movie Tron. The introductions to Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and as a course and as a books continue to be written with a Guttenberg model. However, Brenda Laurel in her article “Six Elements and Causal Relations Among Them.” Brenda Laurel brings and interesting reading of Aristotle’s Poetics to a new media aesthetics.  These six elements can provide a helpful dashboard or rubric to assess what a new and fundamentally different introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.

The next blog post will review in more detail Brenda Laurel’s treatment Six Elements.