with the Internet of things, are we reaching an era of 'post-media'?

It will be a completely different media landscape. So if your program is training you with a similar model to one I'd expect to encounter in the 20th century it's definitely a waste of time.

when you throw out a term like that to professors in a college of communications, they tilt their head to the side and look at you strangely.

Of course, they have a vested interest to believe everything will stay the same.

What happens when everything becomes a medium?

Global Brain.

What happens when we begin installing refrigerators that send us a text message to tell us we're low on milk?

This is a great example of the "Internet of Things". Expect it to mature in the 2020s.

I am glad to see I am not the only person who thinks there is going to be some massive evolution of mankind.

Certainly not. I want to study it's potential emergence for my Ph.D.

And people over the past 100 years have had some inkling that a new phase of humanity was near. H.G. Wells thought of the "World Brain". Pierre de Teilhard thought of a "noosphere" or "omega point". John von Neuman first thought of an age of intelligent machines. Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil developed the idea of the "technological singularity". Peter Russell, Howard Bloom, and Francis Heylighen have been working on the idea of the "Global Brain".

My own thoughts are now beginning to take on a new form, but the rough ideas have been in place for a while. Something big is going to happen. It's getting closer. A new system level is going to come. It's going to come quickly. And it is probably going to change everything.