A rolling log of McLuhan questions and answers

1. Why does MM says movies are hot but TV is cool?
(for me, it has something to do with the difference between dreaming and processing reality).
2. Is Google hot or cool?
3. What would MM have said about talk radio, from Limbaugh forward? [Think about what he says about symphony rehearsals]{but also think about the phrase "the illusion of"}
4. What's the deal with email. [Hint it's a _______medium trying to accomplish a ____________purpose.] What would MM have said about emoticons.
5. Comic strips!
6. Somehow this became a class at least partly about Eliot, so I point out to you that Benda -- whom McLuhan cites -- was supported by Eliot. You could take the Benda/MM argument and apply it to David Letterman and Harvey Pekar. Sharp differences in understanding and accepting roles.
7. MM says that "implosion" ended, in some ways, the notion of rugged individualty. Did the 'Net open that possibility back up? Did the 'Net in any sense, cause "explosion."
8. MM says media is power and that the owners of media tend not to be cared about content. What does this mean? And can it be different on the 'Net. Is the 'Net -- in its diffused ownership -- in someway an outgrowth of MM's ideas?
9. For the idea of cooling off -- consider Moses and the tablets.
10. Do we have permanent goals even as innovations disrupt us? What does MM say about the transfer of consciousness into the digital world?
11. What would MM tell Dan -- I can never teach a class like this again with out a Dan -- to do.? What is the job of a Dan in the digital world? If you can (or should) neither completely reject or embrace it, what do you do?

Going too far?

or just an MM moment?

Mix-a-Lot

So is the 'net hot or cool? Matt D. is struggling with this question right now. Ordinarily, we would say that speed and intensity go with the idea of hot, right. The 'net does this in ways nobody could have imagined. But ...where there's a really big but there. And I like it.

On the media fence

Props to Lisa, who found this essay. And this part, I think, is the part that might speak to the current mental condition of her and Dan (according to Lisa) anbd I would add several others in the room, including probably me.

... I feel a deep personal connection with Understanding Media because
the book was published the same year I was born. We have both entered middle age
now. For me, this means being frustrated with people older than I am for feeling
ill at ease with technologies that both fascinate me and facilitate my everyday
tasks. It also means being equally frustrated with those younger than I am
(particularly my students), who seem to have lost touch with narrative-driven
technologies such as books and old-style movies. I also feel a certain sense of
paranoia, suspecting that younger people now place me in the category of those
discomfited by newer technologies.
For Understanding Media, I suspect middle
age means sitting on the fine line between classic and anachronism. We are
living in the future that the book foretold. We cannot but acknowledge the truth
in many of its pithy aphorisms. In fact they seem self-evident, even if we can
still appreciate McLuhan’s gift for metaphor in stating them. Perhaps we repeat
his legendary phrases too glibly. Perhaps we’re not repeating them all that
frequently anymore. Much has happened since Understanding Media appeared in
1964—to the book’s place in society and to society itself. To me, it is a
classic and just as worthwhile a read for the “millennial” generation as for the
baby boomers.

I read this...

...and I thought of Dan.

One question I will ask tomorrow night

What do you think MM would say about our class if he walked in an beheld it, not having seen a college class for a decade?

Tiger Burning Bright

So here's an MMish story from today's NYTimes.

Read, in particular, the last quote in the story, from the Daish guy. It's right out of the MM playbook. The medium and what it can do are more important than facts and details.

Maybe I'm stretching a point or forcing a comparison, but I linked it to what MM said about Cubism. that Cubism -- through its claim to be able to tell the entirey of a a visual story, the inside and the outside -- in two-dimensions was asserting the dominance of its medium.

And when you think about it the way, something like auto-tune the news is a similar assertion about media.

The new electric structuring

Jess found this clip (although I think the embed was disabled, so you have to click through). Watch it. Whoever is directing the camera work has read MM and has a sense of humor. Because they are almost over-making his point, trying to see if they can overwhelm his content by overemphasizing the medium. And he's trying not to have a point, because or a fixed physical position, of course, he has already doped out the situation.

The thing is, MM himself was embodying an artifact verging on extinction. The celebrity-intellectual. They made a joke about him on Laugh-In. And look at how abstruse his work is. There is no modern counterpart, is there?

We bring good things to light

So Courtney A writes:

Maybe I am going to be wrong about this, but if Marshall decides to use a
light bulb as his example for something that lacks content but creates an
instant environment, does that mean I can take anything and apply these
principles? I guess everything in the world somehow has a "social effect",
but it must be dependent on the society, right? Because some cultures
still do not use light bulbs and wouldn't be subject to the light bulb theory
... but maybe they use fire, so does that count too?

Here's how I see it. MM cites the lightbulb just because he doesn't have to separate it from its message. It doesn't really have one. So it's easy to talk about it just as a medium. And as a medium, it does all those thing MM talks about. When you think about life before artificial light, you realize that, among other things, night was this huge fracking deal. Third shift? Are you kidding? People were just happy to make it through the night alive. There is this amazing book about the whole subject. So artifical lighting completely renegotiated our relationship with darkness. Work, family, schooling, the life of the intellect, sex, sleep. (For much of human history, towns and cities closed huge gates at darkness and sentries walked the wall, and you couldn't get in or you had the pay a toll to get in the lone gate. And it sucked if you mistimed your journey and got locked out in the frightening and completely dark countryside.) So MM says, think bout that, think about how the environment of human life changed because of this medium.

From there it is easier to understand how he views, say, the Kennedy-Nixon debates. What was said and who they were were very unimportant (to McLuhan and -- I think you would concede -- to the outcome) compared to the fact that they were on television. Television was the message. Therefore understanding television was, in a certain sense, more important and more predictive than understanding Vietnam or the economy. Because television renegotiated our relationship to so many things, including potential presidents. And people still don't get this. How many completely smart and reasonable people do you know who just cannot figure out why Dennis Kucinich does not do well in in national campaigns?

Mac users

This guy has some helpful interperetations.

Let's get this one out of the way

Eminiem, assigned

The really essential stuff is in those first seven chapters.
We can cherry-pick the rest. So, to start, read Part I.

Eminem

Tell me this was not written in the last seven years:

In our present electric age the imploding or contracting energies of our
world now clash with the old expansionist and traditional patterns of
organization. Until recently our institutions and arrangements, social,
political, and economic, had shared a one-way pattern. We still think of it as
"explosive," or expansive; and though it no longer obtains, we still talk about
the population explosion and the explosion in learning. In fact, it is not the
increase of numbers in the world that creates our concern with population.
Rather, it is the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost
proximity created by our electric involvement in one another's lives.

Kevin2015 ...

...is cutting edge internet TV and

something along the lines of Google Wave, an
even-more-instant-than-Twitter real-time-service that somehow gets news to
millions in a blink of an eye. That'll actually be it's name:
EvenMoreInstantThanTwitterRealTimeServiceThatImprovesOnTheIdeasOfGoogleWave.
Google Wave users will hate it.

eMatt

Matt D. Wonders what happens when the aggregators have little or nothing left to aggregate.
And he thinks the policy-makers still have a lot of power, even in eDemocracy.

All in all a typical day in TrinblogVoxLand

OK, Lisa is freaking out but in a really really interesting post and she wants an iPhone and intends to contribute to democracy and become part of complete storytelling.

Dan worries that people are blinded by the shining promise of technology without really insisting on the preservation of any humanistic standards to go with it. He is both pessimisatic and strangely hopeful.

And Courtney found this remarkable next-phase of the New York Times and correctly (I think) delved into Creative Commons because she noted the angst in the online world over who owns what as copyright ahd paywalls and the in-out flow of information becopme more pressing issues. The basic CC argument, I think, is: to get more famous, don't charge money. But don't lose ownership. Then, if and when you get famous you can think some more of it. Noted that Lessig (see ignorance post) licenses his book through CC.

Nobody asked me, but I think there's a backlash coming against the free flow of information. Consider the Fairey/AP case.
And then there's Murdoch's block Google movement, which we need to talk about tonight.

You do/don't like the idea of posting leaked material to reddit and then letting the crowd sort it

Jessica raised some interesting questions on whether the (claimed) mission gets accomplished.
So did Allison, although she liked the set-up of reddit.

The rational ignorance argument

So Jessica's blog led me to this lengthy article basically arguing that transparency -- one of the pillars of eGovernance -- has its downsides.
Sheila would call that reporting without context.
Matt D. Would call it the problem of everybody.
Jess cited this response and there was this one on the same site.

Mostly, I think this stuff is not that hard.
If you can get to this file, you can begin asking questions, good questions that need to be asked. And you don't need to be a reporter.

Sally2015

Sally really stepped up on this thought experiment.

Update on what Aldon is thinking about

I didn't know there were two different Epics.

My assignment and thought experiment for you

Watch the scary 2014 video again. Then imagine a similar not-too-distant future. The NY Times, as we know it, is gone. So is the Courant. So are some other old semi-reliable big media models.

What do YOU see in its place?

What are YOUR content consumption habits, at that point?

What role do you see yourself playing, possibly even as a content creator?

(Support your ideas with links whenever possible.)

Things to ponder.

1. the hot new term is mutualization. What does it mean? What role would it play in your vision?
Here Shirky talks about using the same idea to save local book stores. (Even Dan would be in favor of that!) Note his use of the term "third place" to describe a type of environment. One incredible visionary described, earlier this year, how that idea of a space or place could be applied to news.

2. In the eDemocracy model, we almost do without journalists. New tools are added almost every day. You could "know" almost anything you wanted to know, but then what would you do? (I'm asking!)

3. Another option is that linked causes would create the journalism they want. Nonprofits with mutual interests -- maybe even mutual interest not immediately evident -- could band together to create media. But then who consumes the media? What are the other questions that crop up and how do you answer those?

I've signed on as a paid advisor to the yearlong project, which will happen
largely virtually. The idea is that the alternative, progressive nonprofits —
the National Wildlife Federation, National Civic League, Freespeech.tv, Mother
Jones and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy — will assign point
people to work with producers selected by San Francisco State's Renaissance
Journalism Center.

4. Another argument you could make is that journalism of all kinds will take a back seat to PR and advertising, that those sectors have been faster to master. In which case, news platforms like Foursquare might take over and make where you go, what you buy, what you like the main story of interest to you. This guy, for instance, loves FourSquare, but I don't think he's worried about the future of journalism.

1. It’s a geolocation service that you use on your Smart Phone (I use it on my
iPhone and on my Droid). It competes with a raft of services like Britekite,
Google Latitude, Gowalla, and others.2. It’s a game. You check in where you are
and it gives you points and prizes.3. It enhances your experience in each
location. Check in at the Half Moon Bay Ritz and you’ll see tons of “tips” that
people have left for you. Francine Hardaway, for instance, tells you where the
best dog beach is. I tell you how to save $40 on smores. Other people tell you
that Tres Amigos is the best Mexican place nearby, etc.4. It’s an advertising
platform that enables local businesses to give you offers based on where you
check in. Check in at the San Francisco Apple Store, for instance, and the
Marriott across the street could offer you $5 off of a cocktail to get you to
cross the street and come over.

Oh, wait, maybe he does care. I love this post, where he says the little things make you smarter. And he argues that the little things are left out of a thing like memeorandum, which I admit to using pretty addictively. Ah, mememorandum. We never did get to discuss that. Note how other journalists now use it as a way to measure how widespread a meme is.

A Revolution?

Right around the time our class is ending, there will be a flurry of activity in this movement exploring this idea that coalitions of programmers, developers, activists and citizen journalists could run around the outside of lobbyists. elected bigshots and the entrenched professional press.
So you've got a Hackathon.

And the Other Future of News. (#ofon)

eGovernance

Building on EPIC 2014 and on the preceding post (in which reddit and Wikileaks basically "broke" a story with no assistance from anything resembling the news media) one notion Aldon Hynes will want to discuss is the idea of eGovernance:(not a very helpful wikipedia article)
as I understand it the idea that the power of online crowds could result in a pretty radical re-balancing of power, especially in terms of the chance citizens would have to affect government decisions in real time.

A kind of convergence

So, this week Wikileaks -- an interesting concept in its own right -- released an incredible dump of 9/11-related messages .
It's of course way too much for any small group to humans to sort through.
So one of the places it went is to a special reddit thread where the act of user-voting would theoretically flush significant material toward the top.
Reddit itself is worth a look.

Depth, of a sort

One argument you could make is that what the web needs is not "the next new thing" but a chance to kind of catch its breath. It's a situation in which the amount of content vastly outstrips our ability to consume, store or even sort.
One reason I like the very old-fashioned Metafilter is that it's one of the places that guides you past some of the superficial stuff that so annoys Dan.
I mean, come on, somebody making Kant fun?