Ideas Old, New And Others

Michael Hedges February 14, 2011 Follow on Twitter

As events in Egypt unfolded over these last three weeks, media has been part of the story. The effects of new media, television and censorship on the changing narratives will occupy analysts until the next big event arrives. Decisive or not, without media, there was no story and everybody had a role.

New media became the story as website and mobile phone traffic exploded before the Egyptian authorities cracked down. The news media became the story as thugs were empowered to intimidate reporters and photographers, many attached to non-Egyptian television channels and newspapers. As efforts to block information and contact failed, the “global village” became even more engaged.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village” in the 1964 book The Guttenberg Galaxy to describe how technology and the speed of information had transformed the world into a village. This year, 2011, will be McLuhan’s centenary. While knowing nothing of the Web, smartphones, YouTube or Twitter, his death was in 1980, his views on information and the media that transports it are still considered inspired. McLuhan also used the term “surf” in the context of individuals rapidly moving through information, thereafter illuminating new media.

More than a half century ago, McLuhan was early in a long line of futurists to predict the end of print media. Outside of North America, largely, newspaper publishers continue to stave off that demise. Print media, said McLuhan, reflected “individualistic culture,” which he said would be replaced by an electronic oral culture, hence the “tribal” global village.

The global village was, indeed, stirred by images from Egypt. Anecdotal evidence, studies certainly soon to be released, suggests millions of people around the world, through broadcast, satellite and internet platforms, watched and waited, mostly grazing through channels looking for action. Last autumn millions were transfixed by the plight of miners trapped and rescued in Chile.

“Electric information has now become as indispensable to people as water to fish, but people cannot yet accommodate to this rarefied environment,” said McLuhan at a 1971 convocation at the University of Alberta. “A New Yorker cartoon showed two fish on the sand, one said to the other "this is where the action is".” The miners in Chile were rescued. President Mubarak resigned. The news cycle, thus attention, moves on.

Media content, he said, “missed the point.” As extensions of people’s senses, when one medium intensifies experience another diminishes it. “By placing all the stress on content and practically none on the medium, we lose all chance of perceiving and influencing the impact of new technologies on man, and thus we are always dumfounded by--and unprepared for--the revolutionary environmental transformations induced by new media,” he said in a 1969 interview.

Television is “cool” – meaning detached – wrote McLuhan. Though television reduces space between viewers and events emotional space remains. Television is safe to watch. The print media, radio and, interestingly, automobiles are “hot,” full of information and requiring little from the senses.

“The immediate need is for these media to bring, to the microphone and the studio, people from every field of knowledge and endeavor to explain to the public—not their knowledge, but their ignorance; not their expertise, but their hang-ups; not their breakthroughs, but their breakdowns.” Big Brother, the television show, explained.

Social media’s effect – on anything – continues to be richly debated. The “global village” it creates is at once robust and transient. “Information overload equals pattern recognition,” wrote McLuhan, suggesting that people’s brains adapt to make information more useful.  He followed that up with “we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.”

No media tool has been more “shaped” in the century since McLuhan’s birth in Canada than the telephone. It was, for him, a “cool medium” that transmits little information demanding more sensory perception from the user. Today’s smartphone transmits huge amounts of data and appears to demand huge amounts of attention. “The new ways of experiencing that each medium creates, occur in the user regardless of the…content.”

New media and social media are the developing arena for news and information. Twitter and Facebook may be extensions of broadcast. Smartphones may be extensions of the print media. In another generation, people may adapt an altogether different new medium from one that has gone before. As Marshall McLuhan said in one of his later interviews: “If you don't like these ideas, I've got others.”

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