Twhat's Up?

Bob Griffin / October 7, 2009 — With a daily assault of social networking communications setting its aim on our time and attention — it’s no wonder that many of us ask whether adding another diversion to this endless barrage of cell phone conversations, text messages, emails, Facebook chats, TikTok escapades, and Linked-In replies — is both possible or worth it. 


Or, I ask: to Twitter or not to Twitter — that is the question.  Recently, while at a Twitter Conference (Yes, a Twitter conference, which BTW was very informative). A speaker told about recently reading Marshal McLuhan’s “The Media is the Massage [sic] (Message) — and he indicated how he felt it "forecast" this particular time of social media development.


Again, I refer back to my graduate school reading days (see my similar comment in a recent blog regarding “memes”), and how history seems to be repeating itself — at least for me! I had read McLuhan’s famous and often quoted book while in grad school, but had forgotten many of its numerous, targeted foretelling.



In trying to specifically understand where “digital content” is progressing — I have been struggling with the value of Twitter. And yet, it is interesting that McLuhan states:

• The medium, or process, of our time — electric technology — is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependencies and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing — you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relations “to others.” And they’re changing dramatically. 

Couldn’t we say that about what “social media” is doing to society right now? And specifically, McLuhan says:

• The older, traditional ideas of private isolated thoughts and actions — the patterns of mechanistic technologies — are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank — that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early mistakes.

Couldn’t we say that about how Twitter works and the effects of Internet archiving? Once you have that embarrassing Facebook picture up there, it is there forever.


Re-reading this book was amazing. I began reading it at 8:00 AM this morning and was done with it by 10:00 AM. I was gobbling up every word of it. Honestly, you need to get a copy of this book and read it. You will be amazed at how timely it is — history is repeating itself but on a very different level.

In Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” he makes the point that those who blog, are now the new “journalists” of our time. The phenomenon is called “mass amateurization” and Shirky originally wrote about it in an article ‘Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing.’ The point of this is that it is difficult to discern who is a true reporter and who is not, what is news and what is not?


Shirky says about blogs, " They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity."

McLuhan says further:

• In an electric information environment …too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

And if you were to assemble a listing of current blog subjects from the World Wide Web from A to Z — I think you’d find that we have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other. There seems to be no end to the variety of subjects people blog about — it is endless.  Shirky says that the actual process of the printed publisher acts as an antiquated "filter" as to what gets read, whereas  the mass amateurization process of weblogs has no limit but the time to read it, or our attention.

If we think about how Twitter currently works (and I will detail its many usages in a later blog) then McLuhan’s words “…there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening…” — is what is happening. This is what it is all about — an omnipresent behavior of constant communication, which we can tune into or not, depending upon our A to Z preference and the social media device or tool of choice.

Finally, McLuhan says:

• ‘As we begin, so shall we go.’ “Rationality’ and logic came to depend on the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts. For many people rationality has the connotation of uniformity and connectiveness. ‘I don’t follow you’ means ‘I don’t think what you’re saying is rational.’ 
• Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man. The fact that most conscious experience has little ‘visuality’ in it is lost on him. Rationality and visuality have long been interchangeable terms, but we do not live in a primarily visual world any more. (My comment: it is driven by content!) 
• The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking in bits and parts — ‘specialism’ — is reflected in the step-by-step linear departmentalizing process inherent in the technology of the alphabet.

I can't say much more than that, at least, not as eloquently. And I will continue to look at Twitter as part of my sabbatical study and how incorporating an understanding of it as yet another form of digital content is a part of the constant 24/7 flow of information across the Internet.




Many thanks to Stephanie Vincent, NEIA Bookstore Manager, for helping me find a copy of McLuhan's book.