The ignorant teaching the unenlightened

And where do they get the means to do so? Certainly not from the medium itself. The medium has no content worthy of the name - apart from what Marshall McLuhan many years ago, referring to television, characterised as “the medium is the message” (which, acknowledging the deleterious way advertising had taken over TV, later became “the medium is the massage”).

Much teenage gossip confirms the psychological theory that our instincts can be categorised into those dealing with our self-preservation and those dealing with the survival of the species - “self” and “sex”, as the catchphrase goes.

They talk about problems at home and of their personal maturation and about boys/girls! And, of course, it is uninformed discussion. Well, not entirely uniformed because it is informed by pop culture - rap singing, Big Brother, graffiti, drug culture, the movies and now Bollywood! The knowledge equivalent of the junk-food diet - also the result of smart marketing. Style over substance. Entertainment over education.

The fallacy of this methodology is exemplified by the number of pop idols from the vinyl and video era who have fallen to cupidity, drug abuse, cheating and violent crime. Clearly, the entertainment industry cannot be trusted to provide good role-models for our youth.

And the concept of “creative industries”, much vaunted by QUT, sells itself for its ability to generate and market entertainment - including computer games - and ignores the many real problems that creatives should be giving their attention to. It is noteworthy that Hartley gives us not even a suggestion of a map to use in navigating his universe of information. So what is he telling us that we don't already know?

But, it is true that only the exceptional schools are into nurturing creative innovation in their students. This is a great pity. Teenagers are driven to individuate themselves from the crowd as much as they seek refuge in the popular and, thus, are ripe to receive information and the wisdom to equip them for a fulfilling adult life.

And Hartley is wrong to assert that what we are experiencing is a user- or consumer-led revolution. On the contrary, it is market- or, rather, marketer- or marketing-driven. An axiom of advertising has it that marketing cannot create a demand; that it can only channel an existing demand.

In Western culture, the young have ever wished to demonstrate their difference from - and presumed “advancement” on - their elders. They have done this through their choice of clothing and hair fashions, taste in music and entertainment and so on - all, in principle, media of communication - and, of course, developing their own in-group patois.

There is nothing new in principle about SMS or YouTube: it is just marketers taking advantage of an existing demand to make many fast bucks.

Finally, we need to recognise that the current digital marketing phenomenon is a replay of the situation in the 1970s when the purveyors of the then new medium, television, brought about - and, largely, bought - a revolution in libraries, forcing schools to turn them into “resource centres” and to install TV reticulation cables in classrooms - at enormous expense and, of course, profit to the marketers. All of which was redundant in a few years. Not to mention Henry Ford's famous boner, of half a century before, that the invention of the movie film would bring about the demise of the library. Talk about déja vu!

Why has print persisted, we wonder?