Maybe Google is just better at stuff.
Maybe the question is not what will out-Google Google but will under-Google it.

Alyssa says Google is adept at expansion:

McLuhan talks about the immediacy of the telegraph and it was perceived by
literary sophisticates as distasteful. It reminded me a lot of Murdoch's
attitude toward aggregators. It is the attitude of those who feel left behind by
a medium they don't understand and would rather not try to understand. The
difference between the effect of the Internet and the telegraph, I think, is
that the telegraph was a compressional force. It forced different mediums to
come together (i.e. The Associated Press example). The Internet, I think, is
expansional. It forces companies like Google to expand beyond its original
intention, beyond its original specialization. And the nature of the Internet
itself (inter connecting networks world-wide) makes it the perfect medium for
organizations to stretch beyond itself and link multiple outlets together, which
creates sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc and aggregators like CT Report.

But are we headed for contraction now?

Tina says we need the help of "credibe people."


Kevin asks what omces after Google. Shelia asks is the future a future of links?
Alyssa says aggregators are good grabbers but lousy sorters. There has to be more than just links.


Kevin (and somebody else, but I forget who), made me think about the splintering of self and presence on the 'net. I'm Tweeting. But that's not that same as, you know, me, writing a review.

Just a collage

Matt D says the collage is an MMish response to the digital age, I think partly because the 'net is a place of raw materials for mash-ups and party because there's an implicit control-taking.
You gotta see his video.

Not related to class?

Greg, of course it is. The medium is the message.

So is Lisa's "overaching" and lovely invocation of the heart of the transistor radio.

"Why is it all so small" is a very MM question.

Dan says each new tech revolution pushes us farther from our hearts and souls. Greg's old clacking railroad board probably spoke a little more to his soul.

It is technology which further helps to distract us, pushing us farther from the
center. The more people share about themselves on Internet reveals to me the
less they truly know about themselves. Most of what people say on the Internet
is vague, inflated. The Internet takes us away instead of bringing us closer to
ourselves. But I also admit that I dislike technology because at my inner core I
am scared; scared at what I have found and what I will find in the future;
scared to be judged by others, scared that who I am and what I think will be
deemed unworthy, less important. It may seem paradoxical coming from a person
who preaches hatred for the masses and seems to claim superiority to most, who
states with confidence that people are stupid, that I would desire their opinion
and acceptance so much. And at the level of my mind, I don’t. But at the inner
core, where all the masks are stripped away and my individual human nature is
vulnerable, I desire what I feel most people who look inwardly at themselves
would desire, and that is inclusiveness and acceptance from our fellow human
beings.

The Human Factor

So who's in control, Kasey wonders, us or the machines?

Dan says that ship may have sailed:

Aside from a post-apocalyptic Terminator or Matrix scorching the sun so the
machines can’t live but we survive in a stone age world, I think that what I
want to stress, which McLuhan would agree with the contrary, is that human
beings should be in control; we should be using machines and technology to
better our lives, when in fact, we have become a slave to them, unable to live
without them. It is scary reading McLuhan’s book knowing it was written in the
60s. The fact that we are dominated by machines proves McLuhan’s idea that since
the message is the medium, it has changed the way we as a society thinks and
functions.

Interesting how many of us thought about SkyNet this week.

Kasey:

Should we be nervous? That is one of my questions as I consider the significant
power of the internet in our lives. In thinking about the notion that artists
are more sensitive to shifts in culture, especially when it comes to media, I
can’t help but ponder Terminator, I Robot, Minority Report, and even that flop
of a film with poor Sandra Bullock, The Net. All of the stories behind these
films show a world taken over by the machines, and that world is scary and out
of control. I think humans have always been at least a bit dubious of machines,
computers, and the internet. I remember when people were reluctant to begin
using debit cards.

Jessica:

Is this the maximum depth? Can any more information be available to us than
there is (or potentially could be) on the internet? Is the next step a Sky-Net
or brain implants? It's scary to consider, but given our proclivity to do
exactly as McLuhan warns against and adopt new technologies before thinking of
their consequences, it might just be possible.

Colin:

But then there's a separate set of issues about who stores stuff and where that
stuff is stored. I don't really speak the language of server farms and clustered
networks ... yet. But I feel like that's important in a way most of us don't
get. I mean, it's like "Terminator." A lot of power is flowing over to the info
equivalent of SkyNet. It's probably too important for us to let ourselves be
stupid about it, you know?

John, at some length.

You have Kasey to thank for

Interesting, especially in light of John's post about how we think news that we want should find us. But whappens when that's the model, right? We're at somebody's mercy.

On separation

From Allison:

MM concept of "media" being a medium or sorts is very interesting. The impact of
each medium varies with each social network. Meaning, while the actual medium
remains constant, the effect is different. For this I agree. However, once
someone detaches themselves from the medium, they can control the outcome of the
medium. So does this mean that everyone who attempts to change media or
technology is living in a detached state? So by detaching themselves, they
neutralize the affect the medium has. But is that possible? If the media and
technology, and all the other words he uses to describe the exact same
thing, are all around you, how can you detach yourself? It would be like
going into a different dimension, not just mentally, but completely. Maybe it
has something to do with this light bulb idea. Media isn't an actual thing, but
is determined and described by the result of the affect it has on the
environment. So does that mean the words in a newspaper isn't an actual thing,
but the result of it on the social fabric?

This from David re: MM

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work as environments (McLuhan 26).




I think -- don't know -- that McLuhan would say: don't imagine that you can completely separate yourself. (I think again of that video clip in which he seemed to acknolwedge, playfully, the impossibility of achieving a point of view untinctured by the media about which one is trying to have a point of view.

Jess Passing Through / Lisa Can't Stand the Rain

Reading Jessica's eloquent summing-up, I find myself answering in the voice of Dan. In a way, the rise of server-farms and cloud computing is, in MM terms, a metaphor for changes-in-mind among digitual users. Gradually, heavy IT users realized they could affordto be in the server business anymore -- or that it didn't make sense. So they outsourced storage.

Jessica says that's what's happening in education too. Students are not longer understood as storers of information but as adept getters of what is stored.

Dan would say: the problem with that is that, with no wisdom, with no core of cultural literacy, we're less likely to know what it is that we're getting and why we wanted it in the first place. Unless it's take-out.

Lisa says one of the real tests will come when an entirely digital generation reaches adulthood. Will they lose the "invented gene of deep reading?"

As Jess and McLuhan say, people become instant. That engages their passions, possibly at the expense of wisdom.

Courtney A.. at peace? Not really

Here is Courtney's last post, which begins by making the point that it's difficult to make definitive statements about the Internet because the 'net does not really stop and pose for photos. D'accord. (French for true dat.) CA then proves her point by adding another post (about the way online journalism hasn't really opened up opportunities for women) after her last post. I struggle with the same problem in teaching it.

Courtney's lingering suspicion is that idea she brought up months ago. That somehow, we have willingly assembled not merely dossiers about ourselves on the 'net but actual simulacra of our conscious minds.

Our Poet Laureate

...is Sally, for her Holiday McLuhan Epic.

...and thereafter our tools shape us

The internet sometimes seems like a hot medium pretending to be a cool one. If you use Google and Wikipedia to the exclusion of other tools your bain will be living in the crust of the internet and rarely penetrating to the stuff down below. Not only that but, in the case of Google, you will essentially be hardening and reinforcing that crust just by using it. (Use solidifies page rangk which increases use.)

There are, of course, drill-down tools.
But somebody is going to have to know how to use them. Google and Wikipedia have succeeded -- despite being slightly blunt and very general tools -- into everybody's tools of choice for anything. It as if people decided to use a Swiss Army knife for all home repairs.

You know who I think will be important? Librarians. If they can be more like this guy. The thing is, a lot of them are. Librarians had to learn the 'net early. Searchability and storage are kind of second nature to them.

The crossroads, for users of the digital media, has to do with intention vs. passivity. If you can act with intention when you look for information, you use the internet. If you put yourselves in the hands of google, the net uses you.

It's the same crossroads for social media, and my (somewhat hopeful) guess is that some people will leve Facebook and build social media sites that they truly control. This could happen at a place like Trinity. It could also happen in a community of creators and users, whether it's the arts community in Hartford or people who practice yoga in the Midwest or people who are really interested in mass transit. Build the system and make laws while you do. It's not that far from what we did the night we made up Grumpy.com.

What I've been thinking about

Contrary to my original plan, I didn't devote a class to aggregators. That was probably a mistake. I realized that after listening to and pondering a show on the subject by my colleague Mr. Dankosky.



People use these things a lot, whether its a user-rated model like Digg or a bot-driven model like Memeorandum. Or algo-driven like Google news. It's also incresingly common to see news coverge of an item's performance on memeorandum, as if that measured something (which it probably does ...in a circular, self-reinforcing manner).

TPM DC had it at 11, adding that Rahm Emmanuel told staffers "not to come back to
the next day's meeting if they hadn't read the article." The Daily Beast got it
at one twenty and, by afternoon, it was at the top of the Memeorandum--a site
that highlights in real time what is being most heavily linked to--homepage..

Obviously, that starts to put a lot of power in certain (sometimes robotic) hands. Which makes it pretty important to figure out, as this and other sites do, what's really going on with something like Google news.

But, the other problem with aggregation is that it's ahistorical and acontextual.

I mean, you can follow the links and dig around and find that stuff, but it's not there on the surface of the site itself. And that makes me wonder whether the aggregators promote a kind of snapshot-thinking. It's nice to be"ïn the moment" in your zen practice. In your understanding of news and the world you live in, not so much.

But then it's also not as simple as that, particularly at Digg, which has a really interesting search function. I decided to type in something releatively esoteric, something connected to a relatively distant news event.

So I typed in "Zoe Baird"(long story).

And I was impressed.

I even followed one of the links and wound up at this blog which regularly offers, of all things, sort of an aggregation of interesting history links.

It all made me think, though, that storage and searchability are huge battlefronts in the future of 'net culture. In the world of search, Google is inadequate and even if it were adequate it doesn't make sense to give it so much power. My guess is that there will be, there should be eventual search engine models that work in different ways. Maybe even search engines that mirror our various perspectives a little bit. Either that, or materials will be grouped and archived in places that make them easier to search in a more specific and nuanced and efficient way than the Google page-rank system. (For example, today I wanted to read an article that explains the rugby in "Invictus" to me. I bet such an article exists, but Google was a shitty way to have to look for it. But I bet somebody like our own Kevin could start a site that culls and groups the kind of article that cross references from films-of-interest to interests-sparked-by-those-films. And that site would NOT make me wade through the self-published stuff by untalented amateurs: "We didn't get until the end that Invictus was a poem. He should make that more clear.")

But then there's a separate set of issues about who stores stuff and where that stuff is stored. I don't really speak the language of server farms and clustered networks ... yet. But I feel like that's important in a way most of us don't get. I mean, it's like "Terminator." A lot of power is flowing over to the info equivalent of SkyNet. It's probably too important for us to let ourselves be stupid about it, you know?

A little weekend McReading

The second part of U.M., although long, is actualy more readable than the first, because it's a little less theory and a little more practice. I won't subject you to much of it, but do read Chapter 25 --on the Telegraph. (You'll find some amazing stuff there.), Chapter 31 on Television (possibly the most discussed chapter of part II, and the crtivcial reception to U.M. (starts on page 545 in the edition that most of us have).

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.