Friday morning, I took the train to Boston to attend Media in Transition conference. As I settled into the train ride, I took my laptop out of its case, planning to read a few papers I had downloaded for the train ride, figure out which sessions I wanted to attend, work on my own talk, and so on. To my dismay, I found that I did not have my power chord.

The day before, as I browsed my bookshelves, I found an old copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Without my new media sources, I was limited to old media, and the book would have been enjoyed almost as much as having the power chord. Fortunately I had my copy of The Boys on the Bus.

I looked out the window at the rain soaked towns slipping by. The blooming forsythia heralded the beauty of the coming season, but much of the remaining landscape was bleak.

The railway abutments in the larger towns were adorned with highly stylized works by local graffiti artists. The cement palimpsests showed layers of one artist backgrounding another. Culture has always been participatory, I thought to myself, media has always been social.

Despite having no power chord, or perhaps because of it, I found my mind in the perfect place for the first plenary.

Tom Pettitt’s idea of the Gutenberg Parenthesis provides a great framework for much of my understanding of the conference. Prior to Gutenberg, in the pre-parenthetical era, media was collective, traditional, re-creative, based on oral traditions. With Gutenberg, came a focus on autonomous, individualistic, canonical texts. In the post-parenthetical era, we are seeing sampling, remixing, borrow as new ways in which collective traditional texts are re-created. What does this do to the role of the author, and the concept of authority? How does Pirsiq’s concept of quality? How does this apply in political discourse? These are a few ideas that stuck with me from the first plenary which I hope to explore in later blog entries.

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