I suppose most people reading this blog have never even heard of Marshall McLuhan. Nowadays he is probably best remembered for the cameo appearance he had in Annie Hall, in the scene of standing in the line at the movies. I confess I haven’t read it for a while, but his book, Understanding Media was the first (I think) to predict the tremendous impending social effects of digital technology… I believe he coined the term “global village.”
Anyway, he also coined the phrase “the medium is the message,” and while I think he meant this in a somewhat different way, I have a new interpretation of this phrase to offer:
As I deal with the technology of blogs, facebook, and twitter, one unrelenting issue comes up again and again. And that is, what ever I have blogged, facebooked, or twittered most recently, well, that most recent entry is what is at the very top of the pile. This became ever so painfully apparent to me as I recently built my professional facebook page; I of course started off by putting the most compelling and visually engaging media that I had to offer, and then I started thinking of other things to put on there. But sad to say, when people go to the site, they don’t see the most important thing, they see the most recent thing. There may be a way to change the order, but it is not obvious to me as of yet. (It offers the option of visitors seeing photos instead of the “wall” when they surf in, but no luck as yet.)
I may be putting too much into this, but what this tells me about the people who are designing the underlying framework of this media is that, there seems to be an overriding message in these media, and that is, “the most important thing . . . is the most recent thing.” Which also subtly hints that nothing you ever say is worth saving. I object.
I wrote some beautiful blog entries two and three months ago, but sadly, unless I really work hard to bring them out to your attention, or you take the effort to Google the topic, they just get lost.
What this tells me about the people who are designing these frameworks is that they don’t really have an appreciation for, or very much interest in, issues like depth or relative quality. Where in facebook, twitter, or typepad is there a means by which you can prioritize a post or a tweet? (Or, for that matter, where is there an option to prioritize your friends beyond on/off blocking of individuals?)
When I created a “typelist” in my typepad blog to list some of my favorite older blog posts, I had to very carefully plan the order of the list in advance, because you can only put such lists in order alphabetically or by date of entry, either descending or ascending. Once you have made the list, you can’t, for example, take item number seven and move it up to number four or anything fancy like that. In some ways, it is so clunky in this regard, it feels like editing analog magnetic tape with a razor blade.
I do think there’s great danger any time you create an environment where history is so quickly forgotten. On the one hand, it’s wonderful to be inexperienced and innocent and be living always in the here and now. But this insidious nonstop implication that what is newer is better and more important that what is more than 8 hours old, well, yes, this applies to things like mobiles in cribs and perhaps lettuce, but not to knowledge, wisdom, and information.
There is fun in facebook, but it is an immature technology, and once the novelty wears off and we ahve all re-friended every person we have known since birth, I think it will become a very different entity. We may very well rediscover that there was a reason why we lost contact with people from 20 years ago, which is that we don’t have a lot to say to eachother besides how’s the weather and go celtics. It’s nice in a way I guess, like getting Christmas cards more often, but it sure leaves me wanting more.
© Justin Locke
