It's living in the future early-00's stylee to push 'pause' on your TiVo, fire up iChat on your wireless laptop, and tell your oldest friend that her most famous relation is tonight's guest on the Colbert Report. By this point, that's almost passé. But it's living in the future mid-decade-wise to see Colbert on the show issue a "White Christmas" Beatles/Christmas song mashup challenge to his audience, announce that the results will be posted to the Internet, and say "Dangermouse, I know you're watching." And this the same day as I read the New York Times coverage of Conan O'Brien's Horny Manatee site:

“We couldn’t have done this two years ago, three years ago,” Mr. O’Brien said. “It’s sort of this weird comedy dialogue with the audience.”

This sort of user-generated content feedback loop with mainstream media is the sort of thing we nerds have been evangelizing for since, oh, a lot longer than two years ago. Not just evangelizing, trying to sell the idea and the tools to make it happen to major networks and other content providers, if you're a digital media design consultant of some sort: I don't want to even think about how many times I've cited Dangermouse myself in meetings. So it's weird and delightful to see everything you predicted start to come true, even if it's happening in ways you didn't predict. Though, actually, I think this is the way it had to happen. Both of my examples are comedy shows -- by their nature anarchic, irreverent, and bricolage-friendly -- with strong central performers who can push through something they want to do. Those are much more likely sites for innovation than corporate headquarters, and because it's a Colbert project, or a Conan one, if it fails, it gives their bosses some space and deniability. Innovation from below rather than above; really, who could have seen that one coming? But still, Stephen -- if you want to talk about some awesome ideas about the future of media, well, you know where to find me.

I remember, back in the mid-90s, showing a grad school friend how to use Netscape. When she clicked on a link and the screen changed, she nearly jumped out of her seat in shock. Nice to know not that much has changed in academia higher education in the humanities. (Change as per that extremely academic virus-lover Ian.) Via Crooked Timber, I found this choice quote from a Michael Bérubé essay in Inside Higher Education. Bérubé was on the MLA committee that just recommended major changes in the tenure process, and his essay addresses some of the forces that led them to suggest large changes.

About the digital age, most doctoral departments are largely clueless: 40.8 percent report no experience evaluating journal articles in electronic format, and almost two-thirds (65.7 percent) report no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format. This despite the fact that the journal Postmodern Culture, which exists only in electronic form, has just celebrated its 15th birthday. Online journals have been around for some time now, and online scholarship is of the same quality as print media, but referees’ and tenure committees’ expectations for the medium have lagged far behind the developments in the digital scholarly world. As Sean Latham, one of the members of the Task Force, said at the 2005 MLA convention in Washington, “If we read something through Project Muse, are we supposed to feel better because somewhere there is a print copy?” For too many scholars, the answer is yes...

Criticism, at its best, ought to be an engagement with the critic's own culture as well as with the work being discussed. For digital scholarship to be ignored by tenure committees, and therefore actively discouraged to the junior faculty hoping to impress them, is to cut off a major developing form of engaging with modern culture from the ongoing discussion among literature departments. It's those departments, not the intarweb, that will lose out on this one. (In other fun news, Bérubé notes that when you do the math, 34 of every 100 Ph.D.s in the MLA's member fields gets tenure. Do you feel lucky, punk?)