The Medium Is The Meaning We Consume and Create … Together

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 .

– L. Trippi

“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 ”

It has become a constant and widely used reminder to us about the ways an increasingly media-saturated world invade and surround our individual socio-psychological contexts, creating and changing how meaning is shaped and delivered 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 more or less familiar and perhaps update the core implication of McLuhan’s famous phrase.

Many people, in different contexts, have converged on the observation 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.

Another way of saying this is that we have been moving from a broadcast, one-to-many model to a narrow but prismatic form of communications previously found in tribes of people related by ethnicity, location, culture, interests and purpose (such as survival and expansion) … a range of one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many forms characterized by participation and ‘word-of-mouth’.  For 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 producing what we consume at the same time, often 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 what Guy DeBord has articulated in depth in The Society of Spectacle .

McLuhan predicted this, as he suggested that our history has witnessed 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 re-tribalize 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 put to use. 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.

Telegraph and Telephone

First invented (I think … please correct me if I am wrong) was the telegraph, use of which has become anachronistic at best. Next up, 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 legislation or some sort of mission-critical requirement related to accountability.

But it remains the case that much of the communications carried out using telephones evaporates after the phone is hung done – persistence and retrievability are weak or non-existent.

The Radio

The radio is newer than the telephone, and represents the first real electronic broadcast medium with which themes, points of view and belief sets (messages) were created in particular and specific ways to shape meaning. This created the ability to communicate with, and appeal to identifiable groups who could cluster around some shared meaning.

This capability was accompanied by establishing an infrastructure for broadcast, comprised of assigning radio spectra to organizations which then 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 most to what types of output 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. Some may consider that talk radio may be the exception to this model, but actually…. audiences are still segmented. Try to discuss Peak Oil or revolutionary socialism on Bill Good’s show (Vancouver, Canada) and you’ll be dismissed as a raving nutjob.

However, generally the medium is the message (the message that the medium enabled and delivered). And the listener gets what is paid for through advertising support.

The Television

Along came television – the convergence of moving images, sound and the possibility of this combination being broadcast either ‘live’ or taped for asynchronous consumption. I think this capability initially 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 by using their imagination (as they did with radio as well). 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 possible 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 hyperlinked 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. The focus has been on speeding up, interrelating and making more efficient existing organizational and business processes. There have been 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 consciousness 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 impacts of this interaction on 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 subsequent builds of meaning in which many minds and many messages are shaping meaning interactively. We consume, conceive, learn and produce 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.

Returning to the Source

An important implication of Internet-based communication is the ability to engage in conversation. Finally, after over 100 years of electronic broadcasting – a century in which active engagement was more and more relegated to the margins – we are witnessing the explosion of the timeless technology of conversation. As we “re-tribalize” we are discovering that the new media require age old skills of engagement, reflection and expression. Many writers, notably Joi Ito in Emergent Democracy, have written about how this rediscovered voice may well leak into face-to-face environments and have important impacts on the way people reclaim their voices.

Business and government have based their public relations strategies for a century on an assumption that the consumer or the citizen is simply a passive voice. As the Cluetrain ideas take hold, consumers and citizens are bucking that trend, demanding not only the products and leaders they want but also an increasing voice in the shaping of those products and leaders. Mainstream news media are held to account (cf. Dan Rather), transparency is demanded of government (Downing Street Memo) and businesses are no longer able to sweep product, marketing or other action missteps under the rug (Kryptonite Lock, Wal Mart on-call labour practices, Microsoft’s reversal on the support of anti-discrimination legislation).

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.

Perhaps the medium is becoming the meaning we want to and will create.