This video is worth taking a look at - It's an interview over on Social Networking Blog. The interview is with Fordham University's Chair of Communication and Media Studies, Paul Levinson. According to the site, "Levinson is the author of numerous fictional and nonfiction books including Digital McLuhan and The Soft Edge and has appeared in countless media venues from PBS to Fox to offer his insight on media issues."

The wisdom dropped is not necessarily what a whole lot of us don't already know, but it's definitely helpful when trying to contextualize the narrative of the emerging media, and it can be especially helpful when looking for an authoritative voice to convey these ideas to clients, management, and other doubters.

Fordham outlines his feelings about "information overload," and how he believes that there's actually no such thing - that it's our task to figure out how to sort the information out.

And the "dark side" of the Internet? There is none, he explains. There's a dark side to humanity, and that's what we need to worry about.

It's not only informational, it's actually thoughtful. Levinson, who's written a bit about Marshall McLuhan, is an ideal candidate for talking about this subject. A lot of the discussion I read about the things we do and the topics we're interested in are relatively naval-gazy and don't take into consideration decades-old theories that fit nicely into the fields we pay attention to. McLuhan, the champion of the idea of the global village, is a perfect lens to process these behaviors through.

A relatively funny thought: In this interview, Levinson says some things that imply that when a scheduling conflict comes up, he's got the email addresses of all of his students and he can speak to them by way of podcast. Presumably, this is a man who distributes lectures by way of podcast and email. A friend and I were just discussing the implications of the professor and the podcast: Will the recorded Ivy League lecture become a bootleggable comodity? Will there be a day soon when each lecture from prestegious universities will be available, and with a reading list an iTunes, I can have similar access to wisdom that a Harvard student does? Is this already happening?

Please discuss.