More on Virginia Tech and Media Spectacle

Thanks to Ryan Thompson for calling my attention to an Open Source podcast devoted to some of the issues I raised in my post below. The show, according to the website, is devoted to exploring the following questions: "Is there anything to learn about the way we use new technologies in this first mass-murder made, as it were, for YouTube? Are mashups and tributes a form of digital catharsis, a sort of artistic safety valve? Is there a cross-over point where they become pure exploitation, or worse? And what, exactly, is new here? Besides the zeros and the ones, and the ease of dissemination and reconfiguration, is there a difference between a 19th-century suicide note and a 21st-century QuickTime movie?"