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Don’t hate me for quoting Marshall McLuhan before noon. I know it’s one of those unspoken rules, like “don’t call before 9 a.m. on a Saturday,” or “don’t microwave fish at work.”
I was thinking about Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man the other day, the seminal McLuhan work that has driven cultural theory students to Advil for decades. When McLuhan said “the medium is the message,” he was defining how the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.
Getting nightmare flashbacks of those college electives yet? I’ll get to my point now.
I work in the interactive industry, a playground of tools, web apps and devices that frame our relationship with the rest of the world. Every hour, we are introduced to more. These applications act as the medium by which we voluntarily inundate ourselves with messages. We shape them to optimize how much we can get, how quickly, and from where. We are not simply receiving messages through the medium – we are customizing our capacity for receiving as many as possible.
This is especially true with social networking. If 500 million Facebook users are any indication, we’re building our media to indulge our need for messages about ourselves. I’d argue that Facebook isn’t the medium anymore, it’s the people that drive the Facebook ship forward. In some ways, we’re the medium that was so famously described by Marshall McLuhan.
How much more can we push the mechanisms to drive content into people’s minds and actions? McLuhan also said “invention is the mother of necessities.” If that’s the case, then we’re piloting ourselves into an age where constant access to information – and to each other – is a psychological necessity. How many other avenues are available to us to learn from each other, sell each other, or stalk each other?
If “each other” is the medium and the message, how much more can we interact with each other without impacting how we interact with each other offline?
Now where’s my iPhone? I have to condense this post into 140 characters.
Paul Anthony Webb
August 5, 2010 @ 10:47 am
This is an interesting and thought-provoking post, I’ll have to ponder it more while I’m at work.
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August 5, 2010 @ 11:07 am
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Jacoub Bondre
August 5, 2010 @ 2:21 pm
Ouch. Ameet your making me think. I want to get back to blindly pushing buttons. Very well written.
nik
August 5, 2010 @ 3:13 pm
Interesting post. I think our online behaviour is already influencing our offline behaviour (e.g. fewer voice calls).
Wrote a similar post regarding the iPad: http://nquo.posterous.com/is-the-medium-now-the-message-re-wired-for-ip
Dondy Razon
August 5, 2010 @ 3:17 pm
Great point of view!
I actually have a similar view about the evolution of communication. Our expectations or (I really like the way you put it) psychological necessity in how we communicate and get communicated through has drastically change and therefore changing conversations, advertising and written publications.
The content for those forms communication not only need to incorporate and adhere to its limitations but also in turn creating a new subculture driven and society accepted form of communication that’s becoming, if not already, status quo.