Every few years I'm amazed to hear another Marshall McLuhan quote, and how well he foresaw the future of media back in the 60s, when TV was on the rise.
What he said back then rings amazingly true today, which is important if - like me - you're taking a punt on bringing technology to market that you hope will tap into one of the big trends of media usage on the web. 

In a great Peter Hirshberg video from the TED series here......
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/peter_hirshberg_on_tv_and_the_web.html 
he says:

We’re in the middle of a tremendous clash between the oldand the new. 
The medium does things to people and they’re always completely unaware of this.

They don’t really notice the new medium that is wrapping them up into the old medium because the old medium is the content of the new medium, as movies tend to be the content of TV.
And as books (novels) used to be thecontent of movies.
And so everytime a new media arrives, the old media is the content, and it is highly observable, highly noticeable. But the real roughing up and massaging is done by the new medium, and it is ignored.


This passage caused me to realise that I am guilty of ignoring the roughing up and massaging of content that's going on now, in the form of video mashups, for example.
My thinking has been that:
surely, any tinkering you do with the author's work can only dilute or cheapen her message.
Of course, this betrays my prejudice as someone who grew up with 'proper' journalism where talkback radio and 'letters to the editor' were the closest thing the average citizen had for expressing herself on a big stage. 
Roughing up and massaging amounted to plagiarism.
And plagiarism is bad.
Now even I am writing a blog, mashing up the quote from Marshall McLuhan.
And the following one from Peter Hirshberg in the same video: 

Content is moving from shows to particles that are battered back and forth, and are part of social communications.

I get it. The currency is particles, not whole shows.
It's a bit like marketing theory that says every market fragments over time.....where power shifts from the seller to the buyer. Are we seeing the same phenomenon applied to media per se, whether it's bought or just consumed?
Where fragments or particles - not just whole articles or videos - have a value in and of themselves, and are used and re-used in new ways, constituting the 'new medium' as McLuhan would have it.
And where the unedited, untouched, un-massaged content is the 'old medium'.
Make any sense?

One of the young girls interviewed by Hirshberg said it best: 

One of the reasons we put the computer before TV is that nowadays we have TV programs ON the computer and you can download it onto youripod.

Doesn't that tell you that the old medium (TV programs) are now the content of the new medium (iPod)?
Am I about 3 years behind everyone else?