‹ To Thine Own Self … Connect •
(A re-publishing and updating of a post I wrote in the spring of 2004 )
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Introductory Quotes
SimCity Essay Every encounter between reader and text is a kind of exchange. A book lies inert until it you pick it up and begin to read, extracting meaning out of the jumble of markings on the page. . . . What makes interaction with computers so powerfully absorbing - for better and worse - is the way computers can transform the exchange between reader and text into a feedback loop .
“Blogger Jeff Jarvis has been using “news is a conversation” to describe the evolving arena often referred to as “the blogosphere,” and he cites the Cluetrain as a major influence. “Getting to the true news,” he says, “is an additive process, back and forth. News has always wanted to be a conversation, but we’ve always worked in a one-way medium. Whereas it used to be gatekeeper, source, gatekeeper, source, it’s now gatekeeper, source, audience, gatekeeper, source, etc.”
“This is the first time we’ve truly had a two-way medium,” he adds, “and we’re still trying to figure it all out.”
Terry Heaton, News Is A Conversation
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The Context
In the 1960’s Marshall McLuhan coined his most famous aphorism:
“The medium is the message ”
as a signal to us about the ways an increasingly media-saturated world were beginning to invade and surround our individual socio-psychological contexts and change the ways we delivered meaning through communications vehicles.
Subsequently, the presence of electronic media for creating, distributing and communicating information, knowledge and meaning has grown more widely and more dramatically than perhaps even he could have foreseen.
Within this context, I want to try to stitch together a few concepts, perspectives and examples with which I am familiar (to a greater or lesser degree), and perhaps update the core meaning implied by McLuhan’s famous phrase.
Many people, in different contexts, have converged on the same point that in an environment of interconnected easier-and-easier to use software, combined with wetware (human brains, imagination and knowledge), increasingly Consumers are becoming Producers. I would argue that in the same moment Producers are becoming Consumers. There’s an endless double-loop feedback process going on.
Other ways of saying this are that, media-wise, we have been moving from a broadcast, one-to-many model to a narrow but prismatic one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many model of narrow-and-broad casting. For much greater and more articulate detail on these issues, see Searls’ and Weinbergers’ World of Ends , or Clay Shirky’s range of writing at www.shirky.com, or The Rise of the Stupid Network by David Isenberg, or News Is A Conversation, by Terry Heaton.
In these circumstances, not only are we consuming what we produce, but we are more and more often producing what we consume at the same time, and with the same input. This is a never-ending tautology in which we are becoming what we are producing. At the same time we are always, and will always be, producing what we will become. With deeper understanding of this than I’ll ever achieve, I think that this is more-or-less what Guy DeBord was getting at in The Society of Spectacle .
McLuhan more or less predicted this as he suggested that our history has seen seen the pre-literate tribal mode of societal activity and meaning, experienced the de-tribalization associated with the spread of the written word and the rise in the use of documents on a widespread basis, and will create the re-tribalization of human activities and meaning with the help of an infrastructure of connected intelligence.
We currently live in and with this large-scale transition, which arguably started as electronic means of communicating were invented and began to be used. Let’s look for a moment at the progression of capability offered by the major electronic media, by doing a simplistic rundown on the main intention and use of each of these media.
The Telephone
First invented (I think .. please correct me if I am wrong) was the telephone. Telephone has of course become the ubiquitous interpersonal communications infrastructure and device. It is used to carry out voice-based exchanges of information between two or more people. It has remained relatively ‘pure’ in terms of not being bent to alternative or additional purposes.
What I mean by this is that its use has not really been co-opted for the purpose of shaping beliefs or perspectives, on anything other than a one-to-one or one-to-several basis (leaving out the phenomenon of automated telemarketing). Of course many telephone conversation are mainly about beliefs and perspectives, but it remains in the private domain of the participants. Typically few if any remnants of the conversation’s content remain in evidence, unless recorded. And typically the recording of telephone exchanges is done on the basis of law or some sort of mission-critical requirement related to accountability.
The Radio
Newer than telephone capability, and the first real broadcast medium, with which themes, points of view and belief sets (messages) were shaped in particular and specific ways to shape meaning, and to appeal to identifiable sub-groups who could cluster around some shared meaning.
This was accompanied by establishing an infrastructure for broadcast, comprised of assignment of radio spectra to organizations which developed business models and went about carrying out their version of “the radio business”. In the main, this meant the implementation of an advertising-based revenue model. Listeners listened to what they enjoyed or found interesting, and advertising paid for their attention. Since providing content needed to be paid for, radio’s business model became a matter of finding out who listened to what types of output most in the largest numbers and most consistently. The points where large amounts of attention coalesced became of great interest to those who ran for-profit radio broadcast ventures.
Over time, money and power became the main instruments for deciding what point of view, what type of message and meaning would be delivered to identified and identifiable audiences. Over time, there has come to be both a very wide range of choice available to listeners, and a critical limitation – channels stay “on message”, for the most part, and do not stimulate or entertain the diversity of input necessary to establish a full-of-meaning dialogue or multi-logue.
In this case, very clearly the medium was the message (that the medium enabled and delivered). And the listener got what was paid for.
The Television
Along came TV – the convergence of moving images, sound and the possibility of this combination being broadcast either ‘live’ or taped for asynchronous consumption. I think this pulled people closer to the possibility of experiencing a new form of meaning. Filming live or scripted events for TV became a simulation of real-life, or a staged and scripted re-presentation of real-life, real-time events. One could vicariously imagine similar situations, and anchor oneself in whatever meaning was derived from watching and listening to the situations as they unfolded.
This led to another important step-change in the making of meaning, as individuals participated in the consumption of content in their imagination. Even so, the main thrust of the dynamics of participation was passive, focused on consumption of the message in each individual mind.
Sure, we think, feel, relate and connect ideas as we watch TV. In fact, that is the seductive power of TV – we get to do so without having to do anything, or actually change anything about how we feel, think and act.
Of course it is fundamentally useful for keeping the populace of society informed (in a peculiar sense of what being “informed” means), and helps them become aware of issues they may not otherwise encounter in the same way, or from as wide a range of vantage points. And, for so much of its audience, TV has become an ubiquitous presence – a real-time flickering ground to our figure as we move through our life, a real-time simulated companion that helps us feel that we are not alone, a distraction from the concentration and attention needed to shape meaning for ourselves.
The Internet
And now there is the Internet – the foundation, platform and process for a world that is becoming a digital mirror image of the real, the substantive world. Cyberspace is a reflection and infinite digital enhancement (both better and worse, more stark and more extreme) of what is known in some Internet-obsessed circles as “meatspace”. (For a much more comprehensive and articulate exploration of this issue, see David Weinberger’s magnificent book Small Pieces, Loosely Joined ).
At first – as we began to learn about the Internet in the mid 90’s, it was about web sites, dot coms and integrated information systems that moved electronic bits about, to speed up and interrelate existing organizational and business processes. There were occasional forays into new and potentially innovative ways of arranging human activities, and only a few have captured the mass public’s attention – Amazon, eBay and Dell come to mind.
The destiny of the Internet, I believe (dependent upon such core issues as outlined in John Walker’s The Digital Imprimatur), is to replicate and advance the ways human beings interact to create, share and evolve ideas, address responsibilities, work at whatever needs to get done and watch, while participating in, the evolution of whatever we understand consciousness to be (on both an individual and collective basis).
Much of the stimulus for beginning to be able to “smell” and “touch” this potentiality has come into range with the advent of what is loosely called “social software”, with the charge being led by the phenomenon of blogging (Push-Button Publishing for the People, according to Blogger ).
The interactivity of blogging has been described as the first steps towards a read-write web, a two-way conversation between the world and the world, a world of ends in which many communicate with many, and so on…
More and more commentators, theorists and pundits are noting the transition (transformation ?) of the current paradigm of distributing information and knowledge from a centralized source – unidirectional, monologue-ish – through a defined point of view and message. The medium is the message.
I believe we are moving deeper and wider into a multi-directional, multiple voice and point-of-view conversation – a conversation of layers and builds of meaning in which many minds and many messages are shaping meaning interactively, conceiving and learning as we go.
Each of the mediums I briefly commented on above are used for communicating information, through particular shapes and styles of message, and the end user of the medium shapes his or her meaning from those messages.
I believe, and think, that with this new increasingly-interactive medium, we are – individually and collectively – learning and conceiving how to create and shape meaning together, and choose which medium for which type of meaning we want to create, distribute and share.
With the addition of the Internet and blogging to our spectra of available media, I hope we individually and collectively are moving towards producing and consuming deeper, more inclusive, more participative, more comprehensive and more full-of-meaning whole … communities, societies and world.
Perhaps the medium is becoming the meaning we want to and will create.
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January 13, 2005 at 1:05 pm
Anonymous
It’s not the first time I stumble on this post of yours, Jon. Nor the first time I think of leaving a comment. It’s one of your most compellings writings, at least as far as i’m concerned, for a long time. Thus, I also feel compelled to take it for a spin, and while I share your view, I also see a certain negation of authentic communication offered by blogging, which, in a sense, verifies Debord’s claim that there’s no escaping the Spectacle, that the Spectacle has become so diffuse that even though certain media like blogs appear to constitute a revival of the public sphere (of the agora, if you prefer), on the other hand, they also nullify and numb us (that is, bloggers), concealing what is hiding underneath.
What is hiding underneath, imho, is that there are thousand of blogs celebrating some abstract idea of emergent democracy, claiming that blogging will, sooner or later, make the breakthrough to the other side, catalysing new structures and turning old rigid ways of doing things upside down. Well, to a certain extent, blogs are turning information filtering and journalism upside down. But to this day, most of those people who boast their being enlightened in their blogging, and due to their blogging, are the very same people we meet on the street everyday, people who have failed to take account of the fact that reality is up for grabs. And the Spectacle flows on, operationalising its theatre of contradictions, without which it cannot survive.
Perhaps I come across as pessimistic (though I ain’t) because not many bloggers exist in Greece; and the ones who do exist are starving for attention, rather than communication. They want a shot to stardom, and blogging looks like a good channel for reaching a wide audience. Some of them have gone to the length of attaching “do not cite/quote this blog unless you ask for my explicit consent” notices to their blog entries . This mentality is exactly what blogging is *NOT* meant to be about, right? Yet, those people, admittedly newcomers to the ’sphere (but is this realisation actually important for anyone but cyber-antropologists?) , are failing to understand this. Or is it that they do understand, but they don’t share this idea of blogging?
One way or another, I hope you’re right. I hope that this communication is authentic; two real people talking, rather than two Spectacle-authors deluding themselves. If that’s any worth, and it is to me, your post made me reflect upon my own blogging, and the reasons behind it, as well as how much those motives have shifted from researching and understanding blogs to something much more humane - the desire to communicate openly about one’s feelings. The desire to create situations. The desire to live. And hadn’t been for blogging, I wouldn’t have met you. Hopefully, one day we’ll have this conversation over a cup of coffee in meatspace. And this matters: for only when you get to meet someone in his own physical environment, surrounded by the contradictions that inevitably emerge from his daily routine and real-world circumstances, can you be sure you both are speaking the same language. That’s why blogging makes the Spectacle stronger: because it makes people think that the primacy of meatspace is superseded by virtual-networking. Wish it were true, but unfortunately it’s not.
January 13, 2005 at 1:28 pm
Anonymous
And your comment is one of the most thoughtful I’ve ever received ! I agree with what you’ve written.
I tend to think it’s a “both/and” …. hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people believe and/or *know* that the dominant paradigm in which we live, work and exist is flawed, if not broken … and see some sort(s) of vague possibility(ies) for it being different.
But for today, it’s all Wealth Bondage, after all .. as the Happy Tutor would say.
If not ensconced in a steady job, independently wealthy, or focused on *living simply*, it seems inescapable that we need to draw attention to ourselves and our gifts or *offer* to make a living, to find and create sustenance for ourselves and our loved ones for whom we are responsible.
What I am pretty certain you and I believe fervently is that the conditions of interconnectedness in which we now live are, literally, a whole new set of conditions for humans. Many of us are very quick to connect dots, analyze, find reasons why things won’t work in the utopian ways that are set out or promised, and also in that analysis see possibilities. it’s more often than not the vested interests, the *powers-that-be* that stand in the road … and under the dominant paradigm, how would it/could it be otherwise ? It takes the intangibles to become deeply convicted enough about the purpose of human life to give up striving for more and better …. money, power, status, etc. And so we all collude, wittingly or unwittingly.
What I keep wondering about is what might or will happen when it becomes clear to the masses around the world (if it isn’t already) that the dominant paradigm is fundamentally flawed, isn’t working to the benefit of the whole human system, and will remain broken and detrimental to everyone’s future. In a perverse way, I think we may have GWB et al to thank for hastening this possibility.
I agree that so far blogging, in toto, makes the Spectacle stronger, more widely dispersed and deeply rooted, if you will. And at the same time, there are an interesting range of initiatives being conceived or underway that are addressing key issues and possibilities that never would have been conceived, entertained or started if it had not been for blogging. After all, this capability and the potentiality it offers has only been around for what, about 5 years or so. i am fascinated by what some futurists call “wild cards” … things that happen or come on the scene that seemingly come from way out in left field, or nowhere. Blogging is arguably a candidate for that … starting as personal diaries, and seemingly now spinning usefulness into places and purposes that I think might only have been imagined by a relatively small and *weird* few ten years ago.
Hey, george, it is really great to hear your voice again … I check back at your blog about once a week, but it (you
hasn’t been that active for the past 6-8 months, no ? I still maintain aspirations to write more meaty, comprehensive articles to share with you / feed some of your past initiatives .. but i’m lonely and lazy (don’t know which comes first 
… lonely in the sense that collaboration spurs me on, and lazy as a psychic defense against the probability that I can’t deliver the goods !
I am hoping to come over to Europe again in the next 12 months, and I want to visit your part of the world … after all an important part of my ancestry is Macedonian !!
January 14, 2005 at 8:59 am
Anonymous
We think in terms of vast numbers because we bought Ford’s mind. But the game is one by one by one by one. — Ram Dass, from Brave New World or Island - The World Must Decide
(seemed appropos to this conversation)
January 14, 2005 at 9:12 am
Anonymous
Hey Bruce … great to see/hear your voice again !
Really good point, and here we are, talking one to one, one by one … which would have been tough to do other than by email or relatively expensive long distance 5 or more years ago.
Are you awrae of Tom Coates’ often-cited “The Mass Amateurization of Everything” ? Also seems apropos.
Reminds me of a mini-article i wrote about 3 years ago, now buried somewhere on my wirearchy.com site (which I never use nor update) titled “The Mass Customization of Work and Life”. I think I’ll go look for it and blog it, when I get the time and remember for more than 6 seconds
January 15, 2005 at 9:08 am
Anonymous
Still haven’t registered. Probably some passive-aggressive obstinacy on my part.
Dave Rogers here.
Without wishing to recreate our correspondence here, I think I can offer one comment that may advance the discussion to some extent.
I agree most whole-heartedly with the web as mirror, and I strongly suspect it was this post that put that notion in my mind. But it also suggests that all media are really mirrors, and the subject we most wish to regard in the mirror is really ourselves.
In that respect, I would disagree with Mcluhan, that the medium is not the message (”We’re so vain.”), rather that what we’re looking for might be found in our reflection - ultimately, in ourselves. Perhaps one day we might see ourselves and begin to know ourselves. And if there is any hope for us, I think it is in that. But, to reiterate, the “meaning” is not “the mirror” and “the medium” is not “the message.”
Not sure I’ve advanced the discussion, but to the extent that your post obviously influenced my thinking (however unconsciously (obliviously? on my part)), it was certainly a worthwhile post.