In all of these cases, the medium — a blog, Twitter, the Kindle, even the Internet itself — isn’t the important thing. It’s just a way of connecting people with things that matter to them, and with other people who matter to them. That is the real power, regardless of the medium.
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Why the Medium Is Not the Message (via courtenaybird)
I don’t debate what this article says, essentially, but as an intentional play on MacLuhan’s maxim “The Medium is the Message,” it’s kind of a mess. I recently re-read Understanding Media, for the book I’m working on. There’s a new critical edition out that helps immensely in understanding Understanding Media.
If you take the message behind MacLuhan and apply it to this article, it’s actually exactly backwards. MacLuhan uses the medium of the lightbulb as an example of a medium without a message. That medium, even without a message, changed our world, by bringing us the ability to work at night. Through this reading, MacLuhan would say, absolutely, that the medium is the important thing. Blogging, as Malik points out, totally changed the news industry. That’s the important thing. Twitter totally changed the way news was collected in repressive regimes. That’s the important thing. And the kindle is changing books. As Jonathan Ames put it the other day, “these gadgets are going to change the way novels are written and conceived, and I’m against change when it comes to things I do.”
Twitter, the medium, is very much the message in blogging, along with Tumblr. They are changing the way we blog. The fact that we’re still saying something is important, but they have lowered the barrier in how to say things. They’ve made it easier. And they’ve changed the conversation in the process. They’ve encouraged a simpler type of conversation and message, which is more incluive but has had an impact on more nuanced, lengthy discourse. The’re not “just a way of connecting people with things that matter to them and with other people who matter to them.” They shape the volume and strength of those connections. They change and forge the connections themselves. They’re not dumb pipes any more than electricity was just a dumb pipe for getting lamplight into your house. MacLuhan would argue that THAT is the “real power” - the radical medium transformations and the impact we’ve had.
(via courtenaybird)
