I love when the world takes care of my teaching responsibilities. Next week, in my new course on “new media and society” (I’ll share the syllabus here soon, I’ve been slow getting it into web form), we’re supposed to talk about ownership, concentration, and convergence: do the scholarly concerns about traditional media ownership, that concentration in the content and information industries poses a problem for the character of public discourse, apply in the new media environment? Does it matter that Google owns so many features of the new media landscape, in the way that it seems that Time Warner or Disney/ABC or News Corp does? Well, in the timeliest fashion, Microsoft announced an unsolicited bid of $44.6 billion dollars to purchase Yahoo. This doesn’t answer the question we’re tackling in class, but it certainly gives us new food for thought.