New Mediums are Awkward as Hell
The new mediums are the old ones, just a bit reconfigured. What we know of old and familiar mediums is still largely true, but circumstances have created a need for new mediums that we neither understand nor know how to use.
And it’s as awkward as hell.
So I turned to Marshall McLuhan and his seminal work from 1964, Understanding Media: Extension of Man, for a bit of insight.
The medium is the message, McLuhan wrote. What that means is essentially a way of saying that we are the media as much as the media is a poster or a book. That was more true in the 1960s when the television and even deeper so, electricity, started to replace typography as the extension of humans.
Today, with COVID-19, the way to understand new mediums is by realizing that we miss the old mediums. We miss the good old days when we could go to a conference. We now face the awkwardness of new mediums, virtual events, for example, that forces us to realize that no matter what, information just speeds ahead, forcing us to adapt and create new mediums for the ever faster changes that turn us as humans into extensions of media.
The United States once was a place of bounty for European markets. Fur, fish, and fowl could be harvested with abundance. The spread of information about the opening passages from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans gave the white people of America the idea that perhaps if they could control the routes of passage then technological change would create new markets far more valuable to them than an otter pelt.
And so here we are today, with roads, rail and even flight now becoming almost as unnecessary as a canoe which back in the day served as the most expedient way to reach the Pacific Ocean.
Media is an extension of our nervous system, McLuhan wrote. We are both isolated in our physical bodies but connected through digital media. The digital media is so immersive that it is now transcending our own selves and life itself into a network of nodes and bits.
It makes the good old days of travel old-fashioned and nostalgic. An airplane is too slow as much as commerce by rail and road is inefficient to the extent that we can’t ever imagine information moving so slowly. But back in the 19th century, rail carried information at a speed that we never could imagine. It carried print to the farthest reaches, unifying the experience of man, woman, and child. The newspaper business boomed. But then came electricity.
So here we are. What do we do in these awkward times? Robert Scoble says experiment! Yes! He recommends Twitch, a wonderful medium that had me immersed over the weekend in a set by Tony McGuinness. Twitch shows that an experience depends on the medium and how it extends ourselves.
We miss the conference for its serendipitous nature. It gives us a license to travel to another part of the world where we immerse ourselves into the palpable energy and hope for some adrenalin, excitement in the moment.
But how the hell do we do that now when we can’t even leave our homes? It means trying something new and finding the right mediums to tell your story. It may be awkward as hell but soon it will just be remembered as the good old days.
