Saturday, January 29, 2011

The Message is the Medium...Maybe

Among this week's readings is a work by seminal communications expert Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message."  McLuhan asserts that the medium by which content is delivered is just as important, maybe even more so actually, than the content itself. Thus the medium can be a message in and of itself regardless of the content. Hmm, very interesting.

As evidence of this mutually dependent relationship McLuhan cites technologies as ubiquitious as electric light, and figures as varied as Alexis De Tocqueville and Napoleon Bonaparte. Said Napoleon, "Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets."  No disrespect to McLuhan but I believe his analysis is a little flawed.  Let's examine for a second McLuhan's own evidence with the Napoleon quote. Napoleon had it right. A hostile press can do far more damage than a thousand bayonets. And why might that be? Because of the content.  Inflammatory rhetoric has a reach that extends far beyond any battlefield and  has the added advantage of being self renewing. Information is infinite and has no mass. Unlike weapons, rhetoric doesn't require proximity to be effective. Additionally, rhetoric, i.e. content, has the power to mobilize mass mobs of opposition - opposition that is of course well armed. Hence it's not the medium - the newspaper - that mobilizes but the content of said newspaper. Articles detailing the latest exploits of Ke$sha or Justin Bieber don't inspire civil unrest, (not necessarily anyway) but exposes on social injustice do. Just ask the leaders of Egypt. Oh wait, we can't.

The events unfolding right now in Egypt are yet another example of the power of the message.  When the government there literally shut down the internet it begged the question, why?  Were Egyptian teens spending too much time playing Cityville? Was Mubarak peeved because ElBaradei had more Facebook friends?  I doubt it.  However could a growing resistance movement be mobilized, organized and united by a an uninterrupted flow of information?  Yes. Could the flames of discontent be fed by fresh reports of  abuses and injustices? You bet. By shutting down the internet the government was attempting to stifle the flow of information because it is information that inspires uprisings.

That's not to say that the medium bears no significance in the equation. Indeed it is both the medium and the message working in tandem that challenges the status quo. My argument is simply that the message may be slightly superior to the medium because without which the medium loses it's value. Again, this is supported by McLuhan's own examples.  What good would a working light bulb be if we couldn't make use of it's light to consume content? We don't read the light bulb we use the light bulb to read the paper - or the blog as it were. The relationship between content and medium is mutually dependent but not necessarily one of equals.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

The Birth of a Net

This week's assigned materials have us examining the origin of contemporary computing and the birth of the internet that we use today.  In one of our readings, "20 Things I learned About Browsers and the Web" the following line jumped out at me: "The movement of many of our daily tasks online enables us to live more fully in the real world." Really? I'm not so sure about that.

No doubt the web enabled world that we live in today certainly possesses the potential to allow us all more time to partake in "real world" activities, but how many of us actually use that time to do so? Speaking personally I know that the additional time I gain from banking online is usually spent...well...online.  Hours, minutes or seconds that I don't have to spend standing in lines is generally devoted to online activities, Facebook chatting, leisure surfing, shopping, reading and re-reading beloved literary classics or just catching up on missed episodes of my favorite shows. Non leisure activities like research and homework are  completed exclusively using the resources of  the web.  In fact I had been a grad student for an entire semester before I ever physically stepped foot in the university library. That doesn't mean, however, that I hadn't been making exhaustive use of the library's resources. Quite the contrary, in fact. Now I bet you thought I was a slacker! The point that I am getting at is that while the resources of the internet allow users more time to participate in activities of the "real world" increasingly that world exists on the internet.





The embedded videos above are part of a funny series of ads for the new Windows phone. Supposedly it's interface is so well designed that users can access the apps they need lightning fast and then get back to the business of the real world just as quickly.  In the ads apparent Android and iPhone users are so immersed in their smart phones that they wander into the middle of their kid's soccer game without even noticing or accidentally drop their phone into a urinal because they couldn't put it down long enough to take a restroom break.  These ads are meant to be over the top, and indeed they are quite funny.  However they're also eerily close the the reality that we live in today.  Now let's be honest, how many times have you found yourself live tweeting with someone sitting in the very same room with you, or Facebook chatting with your friend instead of phone chatting - or actually visiting? Recently I read a tweet from a concert goer who was viewing the concert, that she was actually at, up close on the screen of her smart phone. So what, exactly, is the 2011 definition of the "real world?" That's hard to say, however if that definition doesn't include cloud computing, online communication, smart phones and social media then it is already obsolete.