In Amusing Ourselves To Death the author does go into a lot of detail about how "the medium is the message", or as he extends it, "the medium is the metaphor".

In Amusing Ourselves To Death the author does go into a lot of detail about how "the medium is the message", or as he extends it, "the medium is the metaphor". Postman contends that Television as a medium has significant problems. Given that you're bring up lectures and MOOCS, it's definitely worth being more clear about what Postman understands as constituting the medium of TV. It's not merely the transmission of audio-visual content, it's is the whole technology, taking the concept of "technology" in the broad sense. For example, the usage of music in TV is part of the technology, and it is usually conspicuously absent from MOOC lectures. Postman would not consider a digital textbook as TV, but if such a textbook were borrow from TV, for example using conventional drama narrative as a device then he would be against that. Does this more or less resolve the problem? TV != digital textbooks or MOOC lectures.