Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

This is excellent thinking, David. I support your thesis entirely, and I want to encourage you. You're way over into cultural postmodernism, wherein there are no hierarchical pyramids. That's why I'm confused by those within the blogosphere (can we please have a different word?) who wish to use the conversations to climb their way to some non-existent top. A conversation isn't a conversation, when one (or more) party is lording over the other. Sooner or later, in that scenario, the "medium" meme must rear its ugly head.

If we are, in fact, in the throes of a massive cultural shift, I think we should just let it happen, rather than trying to manipulate it in any fashion. Chaos theory makes no sense at all to old world logical minds, but it's the hottest thing going in science. Discussions like the ones you have with your friends and readers, David, are more important than you realize, for -- like it or not -- you've been gifted with a vision into the new world.

Keep asking your questions.

Terry

It all depends on how you define medium. Medium as conveyor of content? I agree with you. Medium as used by Marshall McLuhan in the aphorism, "The medium is the message?" Your analysis is right; your conclusion is wrong.

McLuhan - who, in matters relating to effects of the 'net, can be considered something of an authority, since he predicted 'em 40 years ago - considered medium in the sense of a growing medium: something from which a change emerges. The "message" of a medium is (are) the effect(s) that emerge. So in expressing the Internet as a McLuhan medium, the discourse very much is about the changes in us, the way in which we relate to one another, the changes in our societal structures, and ultimately, the retrieval of ancient orality into a new orality - the very conversations of Cluetrain. It is a medium because we care about it and the way it restructures out society.

For a more detailed discussion on what "the medium is the message" actually means, please visit this article.

I entirely agree with Mark Federman - and totally with him on the McLuhan, except I'd invert one phrase: Your analysis is wrong; your conclusion is right.

The internet is not a medium. Electricity is not a medium. It is instead an enabling technology.

Television is a medium. You can tell because it is an appliance that is plugged into the enabling technology. Radio is a medium. 'Book' is a medium - with typographical text being its particular enabling technology.

The web is a medium. The internet is its enabling technology.

I agree with Mark Federman's understanding of the word medium. If you look it up, media can also mean the “surrounding environment in which something functions and thrives.” Scientists use the term to refer to substances they use to nurture a particular organism. Media in a petri dish might be used to grow penicillin, or anthrax, for example. Our media is in some ways just as neutral a transmission belt: it can carry news that enlightens as easily as it carries news that poisons minds.

The question for our time, as it has been ever since the invention of the tools of mass communication, for those of us concerned with nurturing a more ethical society, is what kind of information is to be disseminated, by whom, and for what purpose?

McLuhan's idea of a medium seems more akin to the traditional, artists' usage of the word -- a medium might be clay, or paint, or marble, for example. Each can be used to convey a message, but each also imposes its own dictates and biases, even on the accomplished user. The final portrayal becomes a compromise between the original intention of the artist and what could be transmitted through the medium. And that is even before it is deciphered by the viewer.

Dubber, when you say, "The internet is not a medium. Electricity is not a medium. It is instead an enabling technology," you miss the very point of Marshall McLuhan: An enabling technology IS a medium. See McLuhan and McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science."

One of the laws that applies to all media (ie. all things we conceive and create - this is "late McLuhan") is, "What does the medium enhance, extend, accelerate, intensify or enable?"

For the record, the other three are: What does it obsolesce? When pushed beyond the limit of its potential, into what does it reverse? What does it retrieve from the past that had been formerly obsolesced?