Entries Tagged 'Communications' ↓

Today we’re continuing a series of posts from my Father, Lorenz J. Gude. This is number V. Although my Father writes mostly on politics these days over on his blog YankeeWombat, I believe our mutual interest in areas like media and technology are appropriate fodder for a blog like EXCELER8ion and RecruitingBloggers.

Big Chill II

by Lorenz J. Gude

Expressing strong - perhaps I should say edgy - opinions on a blog can make a person unemployable. Kim du Toit for example.

"….the shock of discovering that my website made me unemployable by corporate America came at a vulnerable time. Desperate to become gainfully employed after closing my consulting business for the business failure that was Did Today, I put my resume out for work (and it is a fairly impressive one, I have to say). As most of you know, the corporation that offered me a job disappeared from the face of the earth after finding my website. To this day they’ve never returned my phone calls, the cowardly lickspittles. A few months more got me several calls, but after ?due diligence? those calls too dried up.

I gave up looking."

Kim du Toit is a ‘he’ by the way and very much a man’s man. To put it neutrally he is a gun enthusiast and 2nd amendment gun rights advocate. He started his blog before he realized it might be a problem, but he wasn’t naive about the consequences when he contemplated starting a business. He knew that Google would make his blog easy to find - particularly with an unusual name like Kim du Toit. His software venture ‘Did Today’ probably failed for lack of backers because of his blog. He discussed the possible impact of his outspoken blogging history with his wife before trying to start the business.

"In the end, we decided that attempting to rewrite the past three years, or trying to cover it up, would be worse?Google will not be denied?but at the same time this blog could be a liability for the company.

Well, it was, just this past weekend. A prospective investor, check in hand, decided to do a little last-minute research, and Googled ?Kim du Toit?.

He?s no longer a potential investor.

His reasoning was pure business: having an outrageous conservative gun nut womanizer as CEO might become a public liability in years to come. And he could be right."

He is too harsh on himself with ‘womanizer’ in the usual sense - he doesn’t brag about extramarital exploits, he just posts erotic, not pornographic, pictures of his favorite women movie stars at the weekend on his blog. The rest is a succinct summary of his corporate liabilities. It’s just my opinion but I think what really makes Kim edgy to corporate America is that he enthusiastically reports incidents of citizens defending themselves with firearms against armed robbers and burglars and the like and makes no secret of the fact that he prefers it when the criminal ends up dead. I think it is important to recognize that the NRA (National Rifle Association) probably wouldn’t want to be associated publicly with his outspoken opinions, even if they agree with him privately. That is an important distinction. Public bodies, like the NRA and corporations cannot be associated with outrageous personal positions. It just isn’t what we think of as ‘professional’. So I would say that it is probably a good rule to not post material on the Internet that might be seen as ‘unprofessional’ or controversial if you ever want to work for an organization sensitive to such things.

A second easy lesson here it is that if you are going to blog about edgy stuff - make it anonymous. Blogging is not only more public than we think it is, it also stays around and can come back to haunt you. Sure you can take down your blog, but there are cached pages available and then there is all the material on other people’s servers that has been written about you. A good example of someone using a pseudonym effectively is Neo-neocon. She is a member of a very liberal family and profession in the very liberal northeast part of the US and blogs anonymously to make it easier to keep the peace. Even if her friends and family that disagree with her politically discover her blog, the anonymity makes it so they don’t have to bring it up. I would speculate there would be limits to how far employers would normally go researching your history on the Internet - the CIA and other tightasses excepted - and that in practice most people will just have to make it a common sense rule to mask their more edgy material with anonymity in order to steer clear of unemployability.

We all get to see events through the lens of our own obsessions but bloggers are particularly blessed in that they can share their obsessions with their fellow netizens. Take the case of Representative Foley and the inappropriate e-mails and instant messages he sent to a 16 year old House of Representatives page. My interest is in the - hold your breath - media aspects of the incident. That’s right, I’m going to skip right over all the good stuff and talk about McLuhan’s idea that we remain unconscious of the potential of new media long after they come into general usage and go on thinking they follow the rules of their predecessors long after we should know better.

What do we have here in media terms? Love/lust letters on the Internet. As McLuhan predicts the content of new media are at first just the content of older media. Old wine in new bottles. What we miss according to Mcluhan is that we see only the wine and miss that the new bottles are not the same as the old bottles. Thus Gutenberg printed the Bible - the most in demand book at the time which had previously been produced by hand. He didn’t think of printing magazines and newspapers as his successors did- much less get it that novels might be a good seller. We think the content is the whole story and miss that the new medium works by different rules and has different potentials than its precursors.

Rep Foley’s e-mails have been described as over friendly, the instant messages as sexually explicit - just like heaps of love/lust letters that have gotten previous generations in trouble. I’m not denying that there is a clear case of sexual misbehavior and misuse of power here. That is a content issue; I’m focusing on the form here. What I am saying is that this is yet another case of someone thinking that their behavior on the Internet is transitory like private conversations - or ‘what happens in Las Vegas’. The nature of the Internet is that it remembers. Keeps copies, caches copies, backs up copies. What happens on the Internet stays on the Internet, but not like Las Vegas - it stays forever and can come back to bite you. Rep Foley just didn’t get this aspect of the medium as future generations undoubtedly will. It feels anonymous and/or private when it is not. Future public figures will be more careful of what they say on the Internet as a matter of course and will back quickly away from any statement that could be used against them - just the way they do now when microphones are pointing at them. I don’t think that Rep Foley would have expressed his sentiments so freely in a signed letter because he understands the rules of signed love/lust letters. Yet old fashioned love/lust letters are much harder to find than e-mails and IMs. It occurs to me that he might well have been cautious enough not to say the things he did on the phone - again because we are all aware that a phone might be tapped. Perhaps he didn’t realize was that he would have actually been safer from discovery chatting up his pages on the phone.

From the point of view of political content it was supremely embarrassing that Representative Foley was responsible for legislation designed to protect children on the Internet. From a media studies point of view using McLuhan’s ideas, it is a supurb example of how individuals are unconscious of the real characteristics of an emerging medium. No less a techie than Bill Gates denied on the witness stand having said things that were clearly in e-mails from himself carefully preserved by Microsoft’s thorough back up procedures. The Medium is the Message

Technorati Tags: Kim du Toit, Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, Corporate Blogging, Blogging Policy, Blog Policy, Rep Foley, Foley Scandal

Today we’re continuing a series of posts from my Father, Lorenz J. Gude. This is number IV. Although my Father writes mostly on politics these days over on his blog YankeeWombat, I believe our mutual interest in areas like media and technology are appropriate fodder for a blog like EXCELER8ion.

Big Chill

by Lorenz J. Gude

What happens when a company just prohibits employees from blogging?

Got this in my work mailbox today. Hand delivered.

—– Newspaper policy on personal Web sites and Web logs (blogs)

Editorial staffers (editors, reporters, and photographers) may operate personal Web sites, Web logs (blogs) or chat rooms only with the prior approval of their editor. Such Web sites, blogs and chat rooms may not contain content dealing in any way with the subject areas that the employees cover or reasonably might be expected to cover. The editor may withdraw approval of an editorial staffer’s operation of a Web site, blog or chat room at any time.

It is especially important that editorial staffers do not express personal opinions - on their Web sites or in their blogs or chat rooms - on news subjects or issues that they cover. Such publication of personal opinion casts doubt on their impartiality, ultimately calling into question the newspaper’s commitment to fairness.

Editorial staffers who have their own Web sites, blogs or chat rooms must notify their newspaper editor of the existence and the address of these Web publications. Staff members and correspondents agree that —– Newspapers can access and review these personal Web sites, blogs or chat rooms at any time. Editorial staffers will, when requested to do so, provide reasonable assistance to —– Newspapers in retrieving any archived or deleted materials from such Web sites, blogs or chat rooms.

An editorial staffer who violates this policy will face disciplinary action up to and including dismissal.

Have they made themselves perfectly clear? I think so. Did it work in this case? I have every reason to believe it didn’t and I don’t believe most of us would be inclined to meekly comply simply because it is just too easy to circumvent such a policy on the web. Anonymous blogging isn’t that hard to achieve and with a bit of advice from your friendly neighborhood hacker you should be able to frustrate ordinary attempts at discovery. I’m no lawyer, but it would seem to me an unfair dismissal suit would be pretty easy to bring against a company trying to stifle their employees to this extent particularly because there is some indication that the memo was aimed specifically at the blogger involved. From a bit of investigation my surmise (and it is only that) is that the blogger switched to blogging anonymously and that the company chose not to pursue him. In short, I suspect that the blogger was able to successfully call the corporate bluff in this particular case.

I’ve talked before about how Eric Raymond’s book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (available free on line here) tells us how networked media actually work as opposed to say print media. The company above is thinking in terms of the way print media works. Just like monarchs who insisted on licensing and controlling printing presses after Gutenberg invented movable type, this newspaper thinks it can shut down the blogger by simply prohibiting his means of publishing. The flaw in their thinking is that they are trying to shut down a multi node redundant network designed to resist atomic attack as if it were a choke point such as a printing press. This mentality is laughably transparent in another part of the memo which prohibits using the newspaper’s computers.

Editorial staffers who operate their own Web sites, blogs or chat rooms may not use —– Newspaper computers or other office facilities for that purpose. They may not work on their Web sites, blogs or chat rooms during office work hours.

We know from McLuhan the broad reason for the blindness. Emerging media are seen in terms of existing media. Here we have an example of a legacy media company trying to control an emerging medium with legacy tools. McLuhan talked about this phenomena as driving into the future with eyes fixed firmly on the rear view mirror. Applying Raymond we have a cathedral like, hierarchically structured organization trying to control a person with anonymous access to the bazaar like structure of the Internet.

The exact nature of the employers concern is further revealed in this paragraph. .

Editorial staffers who operate their own Web sites, blogs or chat rooms are not permitted to trade on their newspaper positions. They may not link their personal sites, blogs or chat rooms to the —– Newspapers’ Web site nor to —— Newspapers’ articles. Personal Web sites, blogs or chat rooms may not use column names or any other identifying information or wording that connects the writer to —– Newspapers.

They seem to be aware that there might be some kind of synergy between blogs and their product and all they see is competition diminishing their product and damaging their brand. They apparently see no upside, no new potential to exploit, which is exactly the blindness that McLuhan predicts will accompany the advent of any new medium.

So what’s the upside? In this case an employee is writing a column that management happens to disagree with. There is a very simple win win here. Hire him to write it and publish it in the paper. Because this blogger is to the right of the newspaper, I immediately think of the very liberal Minneapolis Star Tribune and their famous right of center columnist James Lileks. It is an old and superb legacy media policy to have a range opinion that differs from the paper’s institutional stance - i.e. editorial page policy. It even has a legacy name: Op-Ed. All I can see that this paper has accomplished is to reduce its circulation potential. It also failed to recognize that the bazaar had, as Raymond predicts, found real talent - right under their nose. Talk about dumb….er…. driving into the future with eyes fixed on the rear view mirror.

I have by no means exhausted this topic of the negative reaction by corporations to blogging and hope in future posts to apply other theoretical ideas to understand the nature of the process of corporations finding their way with this new medium. The role of theory in this case is quite straightforward. Those with something to lose are naturally, and often wisely, wary of the new. Better understanding of what is happening, better theory, can help find a way to take advantage of the new while protecting against the down side.

Technorati Tags: Marshall McLuhan, Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Newspapers, Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Blogging Policy, Dooced

Today we’re continuing a series of posts from my Father, Lorenz J. Gude. This is number III. Although my Father writes mostly on politics these days over on his blog YankeeWombat, I believe our mutual interest in areas like media and technology are appropriate fodder for a blog like EXCELER8ion.

Corporate Blogging and Network Dynamics

by Lorenz J. Gude

At the end of my last post on corporate blogging and McLuhan I wrote:

McLuhan?’s ideas may be of genuine use to the advocates of corporate blogging to help corporations recognize that, like it or not, they are operating in a new media environment with both new dangers and opportunities.

McLuhan isn’t much help identifying those dangers and opportunities - he just tells us that they are going to be there and why we ignore them at our peril. For the particular dangers and opportunities created by a new medium you need a theorist who is interacting with the new medium in question. To see corporate blogs in that perspective we need to back up a little. I first wrote about the application of Eric Raymond’s ideas to blogging in general here:

Eric Raymond?s The Cathedral and the Bazaar provides a powerful general explanation of the phenomena of Open Software - Linux in particular. Raymond?s book - available free on line here and well worth reading - is about two different styles of software development. To grossly simplify, the cathedral style is that used by hierarchically organized companies like Microsoft or IBM. The bazaar style is used by open software development projects like Linux. The former uses tightly held propriety code developed by a well supervised team with assigned roles. It is the tried and true method of engineering that has been used to successfully build battleships, bridges, software, and, well, cathedrals for a long time. The latter style, in apparent defiance of common sense, openly posts source code on the Internet where any interested party can change it any way they want, scrutinize it for bugs, and post suggested fixes. The amazing outcome is that Linux has become serious competition for Microsoft even though its developers are all unpaid volunteers. Raymond?s explanation of this phenomena is convincing. Linux can muster a large number of volunteers world wide who bring very different backgrounds and abilities to the code they review. What has emerged is that those best qualified to spot problems and those with the skills to fix them (usually different people) are ?found? by the net - in much the same way that buyers and sellers find each other in a bazaar. Raymond characterized this phenomena as Linus?s law: ?Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.?

The principle that Eric Raymond has elucidated here does not just apply to computer programming, but, I argue can be extended to networked media in general. The network, the Internet, makes any project that requires only attention and labor accessible to anyone with a computer and a connection. You can’t mine coal or manufacture car parts with only a computer and an Internet connection, but you can tackle anything that only requires your labor and skill. What the network does is connect skills and attention to a particular task and greatly improves the chances that the persons with the most appropriate skills and the time to put them to work will come in contact with the task.

Blogging has already demonstrated that it thrives in the networked environment. There are 40 million of us the last time I saw a statistic. In this post I want to focus in on a relatively new kind of blogging - corporate blogging - and how Eric Raymond’s ideas might help understand and implement it better. With a corporate blog you have a subset of the Internet - the corporate network which is a reflection of a sharply defined entity called a corporation that is normally an organization created for the purpose of supplying goods and services on a for profit basis. The sharpness of the line between the privately held corporation and the public is a critical aspect of corporations that allow them to make a profit. What crosses that line - money, information, people, goods and services are all carefully controlled to maximize the survival and profitability of the corporation. Success and control are closely linked. There are the controls over money both internal and governmental that attempt to keep corporations honest and profitable and find out quickly when they are not. But information is also tightly controlled in the interests of protecting the money. Not only does Dupont keep its formulas secret, it and every other corporation, carefully cultivates what the public knows about the corporation. It protects its ‘brand’ like a mother tiger, and works hard to avoid negative publicity.

Corporate blogging must make its way into this environment that so values control. Furthermore while corporations will take calculated risks on familiar ground, it is much harder to get them to take risks in unfamiliar territory - like with a new medium such as blogging. If I seem to be building a case against corporate blogging it is because I want to give a realistic picture of the difficulties involved. I also want to avoid a too optimistic view which ignores real problems - something that techno optimists are perennially guilty of doing. In Eric Raymond’s terms I am saying that corporations are Cathedral like organizations - hierarchical, controlled from the top down. How do they take advantage of the bazaar like nature of the Internet when considering corporate blogs? The problem is that initially the risks seem to outweigh the rewards, but that once people start doing it successfully, the firm that fails to do it is giving away a possible way to grow and profit. Early adopters of corporate blogging who succeed will gain an advantage - just as companies - for example Wrigley’s Gum - that first took advantage of electrically lit billboards as an advertising medium a century ago did well. The obvious advantage is that the company gets better known through a new channel of communication. It is also an opportunity for corporations to develop the public’s understanding of them both as customers and potential employees to a level not previously possible. Corporate blogging is a quite different opportunity for the company to tell its story and for its customers to respond. Unexpectedly, that bright kid in college who might be your future CEO can get to know what it is like to work for your company and put you on his short list. In short, blogging can improve the quality of the interaction and if you have something to offer it can get the word out to those most interested who might otherwise never know of the company’s existence.

Is that kind of advantage worth the risk of inappropriate blogging - taking workplace gossip and power struggles public or worse putting the kind of destructive material on the Internet that disgruntled employees are famous for? I’ll just say this here - it has worked for the US military - an organization even more concerned with control and secrecy than business. Counterintuitively, milbloggers have not compromised operational security or created massive PR problems. Their fresh approach is, in practice, much more effective than the institutionalized (think Cathedral like) efforts of the military public information effort because they reach out to the public directly. Positive or negative, agree or disagree with them, the voices are authentic, and that makes all the difference. The military also deserves credit for not doing what it would be so easy for them to do - simply issue an order prohibiting blogging. Somehow, an institution not famous for recognizing innovation in a timely fashion got this one right and reaped the benefit of their soldier’s creativity without paying a prohibitive price.

I would argue that the reason the military succeeded and the general approach to ensuring that a corporate blog is a success will involve the right balance of control and openness. You need the control - as with any corporate activity - to ensure that the activity contributes positively to the company. You need the openness to let the nature of networks - the bazaar effect - to work in your company’s favor. There is no way of knowing who on your staff might turn out to be a star blogger. Or what unanticipated approach to blogging they might come up with that benefits the company. It might be the mail girl, the loading dock guy, that loud mouth in sales who no one likes but who always seems to sell the most - it might even be the CEO. You just don’t know, but armed with an understanding of the dynamics of networks it should be obvious that it might not work to just task the PR department to create a corporate blog. Here is an example of an alternate strategy based on Eric Raymond’s theory.

Keep you blog within the company to start with. There is probably already a password protected corporate network not accessible to the public. Open blogging to anyone in the company on your private network. Let them know that if they are good at it it will go onto the Internet and that the prize might even be a good job. The inhouse blogging phase should reveal the talent and both the opportunities and the problems while controlling risk. That’s the place to get the balance right between control and creativity and to create the polices that will let potential corporate bloggers know what they can and cannot do. When the inhouse bloggers are ready for public exposure then you can let them go public with a much clearer idea of what the impact will be. The inhouse blogs can even be kept as a kind of farm team to develop new talent.

This example is intended as a simple demonstration of how to apply a particular theory to the emerging issue of corporate blogging. The larger point I want to make here is that however you do it you must recognize that, in a time of change, risk and opportunity come together and seeing one and not the other is itself risky. Effective corporate people already know this is true in the marketplace. It is equally true, but sometime harder to see, in the arena of emerging new media.

Technorati Tags: corporate blogging, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Milbloggers, Milblogs, Social Media

Today we’re continuing a series of posts from my Father, Lorenz J. Gude. Although my Father writes mostly on politics these days over on his blog Yankeewombat, I believe our mutual interest in areas like media and technology are appropriate fodder for a blog like EXCELER8ion.

Corporate Blogging

by Lorenz J. Gude

I have become aware of corporate blogging through the work of my son and daughter-in-law who, among other things, have been working on helping corporations get their own blogs started. One thing they experience is that there is both resistance and enthusiasm for corporate blogging. What I mean here by corporate blogging is employees blogging on behalf of their company trying to advance its cause, not frustrate it, or pursue personal agendas. In this post I want to explore why some companies first reaction is concern about the negative potential while for others it is an opportunity to take advantage of a new avenue of communication to their customers and even their potential employees.

My understanding of what happens in any culture when a new medium is introduced has been heavily influenced by the work of Marshal McLuhan. He is most remembered for his work Understanding Media which contains the famous dictum, ‘the medium is the message’. However, it is his earlier, much more scholarly work, The Gutenburg Galaxy that has convinced me of his lasting usefulness as a theoretician through which to understand the arrival of phenomena like corporate blogging.

McLuhan argued that when a new medium emerges people tend to focus on content, not form. For example, when Gutenburg invented movable type, monarchs immediately saw the potential for the presses to be used for political agitation against them and brought in Draconian laws controlling every printed page. Conversely, it took 300 years for interchangeable type to morph into the system of interchangeable parts we all take for granted today. Innovations that emerge as people come to grips with the implications of a new media environment are difficult to see at first because no one can see the new environment. Indeed, at first, they can only see the innovation in the context of the old environment.

Many of the people who run corporations have grown up in the media environment dominated by TV, while the rising generation has grown up in a transitional TV to Internet environment. From the perspective of the older media environment corporate blogs look like a highly risky new conduit for content already conveyed reliably to the public through regular customer relations, marketing, and PR channels. For the advocates of corporate blogging the new medium looks like an opportunity to reach the public more authentically and directly than traditional advertising and public relations. Consequently, when some corporations consider blogs they tend to see risk while others see opportunity. The bottom line is that McLuhan’s ideas may be of genuine use to the advocates of corporate blogging to help corporations recognize that, like it or not, they are operating in a new media environment with both new dangers and opportunities. And yes, negative publicity is one danger but the larger one is to cling to a world that no longer exists and fail to positively engage the new media environment.

Today we’re beginning a series of posts from my Father, Lorenz J. Gude. Although my Father writes mostly on politics these days over on his blog Yankeewombat, I believe our mutual interest in areas like media and technology are appropriate fodder for a blog like EXCELER8ion. Shannon and I tend to focus on social media, and specifically how this medium is contributing to a meaningful shift in communications and marketing that we’re all grappling to understand. From some of my conversations with my Father on blogging, and its wealthy cousin, corporate blogging, Dad has taken to writing some pieces on the topic, which is what I’ll be sharing with you. To start us off, Dad, aka Lorenz or The Yankee Wombat, gives us an intro to Marshall McLuhan and some of his seminal ideas on media that are still highly regarded (and relevant) today and at the same time, still largely misunderstood. Largely misunderstood? Pah! Not by me, because all of this is over my head to begin with! Many of us in the blogosphere, and in much more finite terms, the Recruitosphere, fear that we spend too much time tossing around the same tired views, voices and inside jokes and to that Shannon and I say, YES, let’s not lose sight of the big picture. So read on, and take this as a part I of X in a series on understanding this new medium, er, message from an observer with a valuable viewpoint.

The medium is the message

by Lorenz J. Gude

Anyone who has heard of McLuhan has probably heard his most famous quote “The Medium is the message.” I studied McLuhan quite a bit in connection with my teaching about media in the seventies and eighties. What I have realized lately getting interested in McLuhan’s thinking again and referring to it in some of my blog posts is that while McLuhan’s famous dictum is still well known it is not well understood. McLuhan is making a point about form and content. The medium - handwriting, print, TV, blogging - whatever - is ‘the medium’. The message - ‘meet me in the square at 6:30′, ‘Texas election tied’, ‘Tsunami relief delayed’ - whatever - is the content. What McLuhan is saying is deliberate nonsense - on the face of it. The message, of course, is normally the content.

What McLuhan was trying to do was shock us into awareness of the importance of form as opposed to content (or message) by means of an outrageous statement. He failed. I find most people don’t get it. I certainly didn’t until I read McLuhan carefully. What he is saying, put in a more balanced way, is that the form of our communications media have a large effect on us but we miss it because we are understandably focused on the content that is being communicated. The phrase “Content is king” reinforces the basic truth that we select what we consume in any medium by the content. The remote control, for example, enables us to instantly make decisions about content while watching TV. Content is what grabs our awareness like the figure in a picture, while we take the background - the medium - for granted.

Of course in this particular famous picture the figure and the ground are ambiguous - so we can see it as two faces or a vase. What McLuhan is asking us to do is make a similar switch of awareness from how the content is impacting us to how the medium is impacting us.

McLuhan developed his thinking at a time in human history when new media - TV, radio, mass circulation magazines, motion pictures were all changing our day to day experience of the world. A hundred years ago most people were farmers. They saw the occasional newspaper. Read a few books if they were so inclined. Most of their time was taken up with work - with hay and cows and chickens and eggs. No TV, or movies or radio. McLuhan was struck by the indisputable fact that the media environment had been drastically changed in the 20th century. Today I sit here at a computer most of the day. I happened to grow up on a farm with cows and chickens so I have a reality based picture of what it was like 100 years ago, but I don’t live in that world at all any more. Most people today in the developed world have had absolutely no contact with a world where cows and chickens are a more important part of their everyday experience than TV. We take these changes for granted; McLuhan warns us not to do that.

McLuhan was amazed when he began to look into the effects of this sort of change of environment on human beings. He searched for evidence of changes caused by living in different media environments. One of the things that got him started was a phenomena noticed by the British when they began to give civil service exams in India. They discovered that examinees passed the tests with high marks because they could remember word for word the entire text book the exam was based on without always fully understanding the content. McLuhan argued that they could perform this prodigious feat of memory because they came from an oral culture. Writing was rare - everything of verbal importance was heard, not read, and then had to be remembered precisely, if it were to be preserved. What McLuhan theorized was that differences in the media environment change the emphasis we place on our various senses. Therefore it impacts the way our brains develop and the way we experience the world. In this case literacy reduces the importance of the process of hearing and remembering and increases the importance of the sense of sight and reduces the necessity to remember the exact wording. McLuhan called that shift in sensory emphasis sense ratio.

Now lets skip forward to our own time and look at an example of the very different media environment we live in. We live in a period when the media environment in terms of where we get our news is changing from the near total domination of TV to a mix of TV and the Internet. McLuhan didn’t live to see the Internet, but an analysis in McLuhan’s terms of the changes introduced by the Internet would begin with some fairly obvious observations. The first might be that TV and the Internet, while both using a screen, engage different parts of the brain because TV is dominated by visual content and the computer screen by print. In my experience computers have made me much more aware of how emotional TV is. Lets do a thought experiment. Take the Iraq war and close your eyes and see what images you remember. I get burning tanks, the aftermath of suicide bombings, stills from Abu Ghraib. I don’t know what images you get but I am pretty sure they will have a strong emotional element. If you read news and blogs on the Internet about the Iraq war then think of what stands out for you from that experience. It will probably be more about ideas and interpretations of events. What I notice is the great variety of different views expressed by bloggers and the relatively predictable view of events that the media presents. I see that dissonance because as a student of McLuhan I am looking for it. Because I am less concerned with content I am not swept away by each competing point of view but very impressed in how a change in the media environment is changing the way we see events. I notice that the established media are accustomed to framing events in certain ways and that bloggers frame them differently. The bloggers break the monopoly the media have enjoyed in the framing of events. This is exactly the kind of thing that McLuhan was saying we miss when we focus exclusively on content.

I’m no genius when it comes to media. It wasn’t until I started using the Internet and happened to not have a TV at all that I got it that TV is so emotionally manipulative. I first saw it when I visited my son in the US and he had a large screen TV. I became aware that every time the news came on my stomach clenched, and that I was moved into upsetting emotional space. Once I noticed it, McLuhan gave me a way of understanding that it was the medium itself that was a big part of the reaction - not just the content. I could read about the same events on the Internet with much less emotional reaction. To the extent that kind of difference is caused by the medium in question, that medium, while not the whole message, is very much a part of the message.

Technorati Tags: Marshall McLuhan, blogging, the-medium-is-the-message