iPad, Flipboard & PBS MediaShift

This is my first post to this blog since receiving my iPad as my Christmas present from my wife this past December. I had no idea that she was planning on purchasing such a gift for me, and, needless to say, I was quite surprised. I had been talking about it for a while as a necessary component of my research, but didn’t have the gumption to purchase it myself. That was always a half-joke, but that was only because I didn’t realize what a difference the iPad would have on my understanding of the topic.

I knew that one of my first app downloads should be Flipboard. In a nutshell, Flipboard is a digital magazine that aggregates information from different online outlets such as Wired, Good and PBS. As I was flipping through categories to choose magazines (all of which are free) I stumbled across a PBS magazine called MediaShift. It’s rare that something should occur with such serendipity as MediaShift is all about how our changes in technology impact our media environment. Essentially, it is a collection of articles that are almost all relevant to my thesis exploration of media ecology.

One article stood out to me this past week; it was all about self-publishing. Our graduate class had talked briefly about whether or not authors like Milton or Spenser would have have flourished in our society. It was quickly mentioned that they were funded by the wealthy, and only the elite could afford the luxury of their works. This article on self-publishing offered a unique perspective. Technology like the printing press offered written work to the masses in their own language…they now afford the same books as the elite. With the emergence of self-publishing, individuals have recently been able to put their words into print for the masses without going through a publisher.

What does this mean? Well, aspiring authors can now demo a book before approaching a publisher to have it put on bookstore shelves. Not only that, but they can ePublish their book and let it survive on its own merits in the growing eBook market. Think of all the apps and their developers that could not have published their software were it not for such a market. With barriers to entry being reduced for authors and developers, the future of literature and software development is paving the way for large cultural changes…all due to how technology impacts our media ecology.