‘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.
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On Mount Kyllini the Publishing Gods were in filthy moods. Sales were down, bookshops were closing and worse, they’d been called together to consider a membership application.
‘What’s the applicant’s name?’ asked the God of Hardback, unable to hide his boredom.
The Goddess of Paperback leaned back in her chair, causing her spine to crack noisily. ‘The form says eBook.’
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Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with social media will know that using it as a backchannel is not an option you switch on or off. It is, inherently, at least 50% backchannel. Social media’s most salient characteristic, in fact, is its interactivity. So much so that one has trouble disentangling message ‘push’ from what you almost immediately get back. Post to a LinkedIn group, say, and people reply. And they expect a reply in return. You might have been trying to do a bit of PR, but what you get drawn into is a conversation.
This diminution of lag between messaging and response – coupled with the transparency of that response to the whole community (be it positive or negative) is what makes social media so hard to fit into traditional models of business communications.
being interviewed at the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing conference in Frankfurt. He spoke at the conference about mobile platforms from the perspective of publishers faced with multiple delivery models including apps and the web.
Have a listen and let us know what you think.
I was sure we’d entered the space age. It weighed as much as a small car, but its silver disks were things of futuristic beauty. I held cinema days for friends. ‘It’s great,’ they said. ‘Really groovy’ – this was the early 80′s – ‘But can’t it do anything else?’
They’d heard of machines able to tape television while you were out.
They’d seen the future.
LaserDisc players are no more, and this year’s must-have bit of kit is the e-reader. A herd of cheap devices are lining up to be the next electronic white elephant. Everyone reads digital these days, in case you didn’t know. Books are so last year. Think of the trees.