Draft 1 Education, Media and the End of the Book: A view from German Media Theory Rainer Leschke & Norm Friesen (July 2013) All cultures are interpenetrated and structured by their media. From the drum languages of West Africa through medieval manuscripts to today’s global digital networks, media mediate culture, shaping social relations, both in terms of what is communicated and how such communication occurs. All cultures are in this sense media-cultures, and it further follows that all forms of involvement with culture, including educational and formative participation, are unavoidably also engagements with its media. Becoming part of a culture, opening up new cultural horizons, and developing and problematizing these further, are all processes that are mediated through media. To be able to reflect on the mediality 1 of cultures can consequently be seen as one of the most elementary forms of reflexive cultural engagement. Processes of education and formation, from formal schooling to techniques of self-help, represent forms of engagement with one’s culture and with oneself that are always also engagement with the particular mediality of cultural communication. The study of culture has long ignored the significance of media in this sense. Instead of examining the production, circulation and remediation of the Victorian novel or the Elizabethan theatre, for example, it has tended to study “Dickens” or “Shakespeare,” as if the mediatic and material nature of their cultural production was either invisible or tertiary. This forgetting of media and mediation (Medienvergessenheit) has applied not only to the conditions of culture and its appropriation, but particularly to the close connection of education and socialization to media. Socialization and conscious self-formation are not only medially mediated, but have this condition of mediation itself as a subject of conscious reflection. Understanding processes of formation in and through media is dependent on understanding media themselves –their theory, analysis, history, and aesthetics. 2 This paper represents an initial foray in this direction. It takes aspects of German media studies (e.g., see Horn, 2008) related to media history, theory and aesthetics, and sketches out one particular way of understanding their relevance to contemporary education. In so doing, it introduces a number of notions important to theories of media that recently been developing in German-speaking Europe. Besides Medienvergessenheit, these include the notion of a Leitmedium, of media-systems, of Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of social distinctions, and also the belief that a given medium constitutes a Foucauldian “apparatus” or dispositif. It begins, however, by explaining the generally negative response of those in education to new media forms by developing the notion of the gradual and often conflicted integration or “enculturation” of new technologies into the social order. Like the musical Leitmotif, a Leitmedium serves as a repeating and guiding example for such a process. It acts as a standard to determine what is valuable and desirable in cultural contexts offering multiple, competing media or within complex “media- 1 The chapter uses a vocabulary of “mediality” and “mediation” that is introduced in Friesen, N. & Hug, T. (2009). The Mediatic Turn: Exploring Consequences for Media Pedagogy. Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences. (K. Lundby, Ed.). New York: Peter Lang. Pp. 64-81. 2 These initial two paragraphs have been freely adapted and translated from an unpublished document with the permission of the authors: Leschke, R., Spangenberg, P. & Tholen, C. (2012). "Medienbildung:" Grundsätze zum Verhältnis von Medienkultur und Medienbildung.