Medium and Meaning

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This time, of course, you might be right…especially since you and I seem to agree that the Web isn’t yet another medium. Something important and different is going on.

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The above quote is taken from the Wall Street Journal’s complete version of a debate between David Weinberger and Andrew Keen on the premises and conclusion of Keen’s new-ish book The Cult of the Amateur - How today’s Internet is killing our culture.

I am not an expert, so not really qualified to enter into the definitive debate about whether or not the Web is a medium or not.  However, I am entitled to voice my opinion since this is my blog.  I think today I would say the Web is an infrastructure for creating, retrieving and sharing information and opinion of which traditional media and emergent derivative forms of those media are essential, core components.  I think it is likely to become a medium, and perhaps the dominant medium at some point in the future.

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Yes, Andrew, we are amateurs on the Web, although there’s plenty of room for professionals as well. But we are not replicating the mainstream media. We’re building something new. We’re doing it together. Its fundamental elements are not bricks of content but the mortar of links, and links are connections of meaning and involvement. We’re creating an infrastructure of meaning, miscellaneous but dripping with potential for finding and understanding what matters to us. We’re building this for one another. We’re doing it by and large for free, for the love of it, and for the joy of creating with others. That makes us amateurs. And that’s also what makes the Web our culture’s hope.

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David makes an important distinction here, in my opinion.  The Web, which may be on its way to becoming a bona fide medium, is the first infrastructure for the mass distribution of information and opinion for which "us" is also an essential core component.

I am a hairless monkey, and an amateur one at that.  In keeping with that status, I feel entitled to share with you a piece I wrote a couple of years ago which I think mirrors David’s "We’re creating an infrastructure of meaning, miscellaneous but dripping with potential for finding and understanding what matters to us. We’re building this for one another."

Riffing off a definitive expert, I titled it The Medium Is The Meaning We Consume and Create.

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With new technologies such as Skype which make it simple and affordable to communicate presence over the Internet, we are rediscovering the power of real conversation and engagement. Many people are beginning to publish these as podcasts, where roundtables convene to discuss emerging issues, engage in conversation and solicit engagement and participation. In the new re-tribalised world, the fire at the centre of our conversation is the monitor, and we gather in front of it to use the new tools of connectivity and the ancient tools of conversation to bring ourselves to a new level of engagement with our media.

I believe that with this new increasingly interactive medium, we are individually and collectively learning and conceiving how to create and shape meaning together. We are now in the early stages of much more choice and control over which medium we use for which type of meaning we want to create, distribute and share.

With the addition of the Internet and blogging to the 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.

Tags: David Weinberger, Andrew Keen, Marshall McLuhan, The Cult of the Amateur, Everything Is Miscellaneous

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