Alex Sayf Cummings

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• Why MOOCs are Like the Music Industry

  by Alex Sayf Cummings

  Every year, I have students in my media history class break into two teams. One side has to argue that the media in America have become more homogenous and monopolized by a small handful of corporate interests -- the Viacoms and Murdochs of the world, and possibly the Koch brothers (if they can get their hands on the Los Angeles Times).The other team argues the counterpoint -- that despite the consolidation of radio stations, newspapers, and other traditional media by a few big corporations, the media have actually grown more open and diverse over the last thirty years, with the proliferation of cable, video, blogs, tweets and texts and so forth. Consumers have more options, not less.

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• SOURCE: Special to HNN
  4-16-13
  

  Jim Cullen: Review of Alex Sayf Cummings's "Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century" (Oxford, 2013)

  Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His latest book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, was recently published by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.