I’m getting mad (with Marshall McLuhan)

Posted on by Rob Yates
 

‘You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.’

I would imagine that Understanding Media (1964) is surely one of those books – like Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Klein’s No Logo – owned by many yet read by few. Great then, on the occasion of McLuhan’s centenary to be able to remind oneself of his ideas online over a sandwich. Through Tom Wolfe’s excellent introduction I learned of the influence on McLuhan of catholic mystic Teilhard de Chardin. Now, in writing this, I thought it’d be useful to link through to the excellent entry on de Chardin (who shaped the religious and intellectual outlook many a mid-century catholic intellectual including Belloc, Chesterton and Auden amongst others) in the ODNB. But if I did that, the majority would end up here, on a page so utterly dreadful that it is to user experience what Fat Burger is to healthy eating. Instead I have few choices but to direct you to here. More depressingly, and completely unsurprisingly, if you Google ‘de Chardin’ the first result is from Wikipedia and you give up long, long before you find a scholarly hit in the results. Continue reading →

The IPL and the end of the web as we know it

Posted on by Rob Yates
IPL cricketerWatching the Indian Premier League cricket the other evening (and loving how they have branded the language: a 6 is not a 6 any more but a ‘DLF maximum’ and a half-century a ‘Citibank moment of success’) I was struck, in the numerous ad breaks, by the stream of brands that drive consumers straight to Facebook, dispensing (in their advertising) with their standard URLs. Coke, Lucozade and Dulux all employ the Facebook.com/brand URL; and the Army simply suggest that one Googles ‘Army Jobs’. Though we can’t quite yet tell who will be the victor in the so-called platform wars, we know that someone will, and we can probably predict a date when the idea of a ‘corporate url’ will become anachronistic. I am not surprised by this trend. In the 15 years I spent working with consumer brands online, the mantra (from New York to London to Mumbai to Beijing) was always ‘experience’: define moments when the consumer is open to brand communications and then create experiences that meaningfully intersect those moments with the brand. Continue reading →