@mix i am struggling to wrap my head around 'the medium is the message' - can you point me to the best thing you have read on it which has helped you to grok it and how you have gone on to apply it. have been having some thoughts related to it, but not sure if I am going off on a tangential misunderstanding. it's kinda inspired by your lightning talk at dweb camp.

Would also be interested to hear what you would do differently with the next lightning talk - think i saw you mention somewhere that you had been thinking about it.

Had to read Understanding Media while studying cinema in university many years ago. Smoked some weed and read a few pages at a time to try to get something from it.

Remember back, what I got is that the the content itself isn't as important as the medium that is used to propagate the message. So for example, it doesn't matter what applications we build, the phone or the computer itself already has embedded messages within it's purpose and design.

Donno if pot driven learning is the best, so what I got from it may not make any sense...

Luandro heeeeeey I was a TA for the professor who taught that subject in my film school for years. That topic is very dear to me. I didn't do weed though so your understanding of it is probably deeper than mine.

If you let me butt myself here, and apologies for a long-ish post—I gave an informal talk about this a few weeks ago to a group of friends, so I thought I share what I gathered during my research.

For me, the best thing I've read about media theory is No Sense of Place (here's a short summary that I believe focuses on the key points of the book). The author focuses not only on how different ways of communicating (the medium, from McLuhan) affect us, but how it relates to physical space.

An great example in the book focuses on how you would tell your parents, friends or university professors about your summer vacation: each will get a different version: the "clean", the "adventurous", or the "cultural" one. And that works because each group is in a different "physical" place. If instead you got a welcome party, where the three groups collide, you'd be "forced" to tell a safer version to not make it awkward for anyone in particular. Yet this version is a weird compromise of the three versions you'd tell otherwise. If you liken this analogy to, say, Twitter, or any social network, you get this "welcome party" setting all the time: you're constantly evaluating how different sections of your audience are going to react to what you say, or you'll get misinterpreted by any of them (danah boyd calls this "context collapse")

Coming back to a more concrete explanation of "medium is the message", in my opinion, McLuhan tends to be obscure on purpose, he will mention something, and then you'll need to interpret it through your own preconceptions. In my opinion, this makes it so each person takes away something different from what he has to say. He gave a long interview to Playboy in 1969, where the interviewer forces him to be more concrete. I got a lot of interesting quotes from that one, here's one:

Q: how [can you] hold the development of printing responsible for such apparently unrelated phenomena as nationalism and industrialism?

A: Nationalism didn't exist in Europe until the Renaissance. The printing press, by spreading mass-produced books and printed matter across Europe, turned the vernacular regional languages of the day into uniform closed systems of national languages – just another variant of what we call mass media – and gave birth to the entire concept of nationalism.

The homogeneity of money, markets and transport also became possible for the first time, thus creating economic as well as political unity and triggering all the dynamic centralizing energies of contemporary nationalism. By creating a speed of information movement unthinkable before printing, the Gutenberg revolution thus produced a new type of visual centralized national entity that was gradually merged with commercial expansion until Europe was a network of states.

@dan hassan,

A good way to understand the medium is the message is to to notice that many times the medium change is actually more important than the content. We often tell the same content over and over again while it the evolution of different media channels cause the greatest side effect.

One great example is the web. Prior to the popularization of the World Wide Web there was no mass media channel that was open to everyone. You did have lots of different mass media channels with TV, Radio and printed media being the most important ones but who could publish? who could broadcast? With the Web all of a sudden, everyone could and that changed the world. We still tell the same stories, take the same photos, the medium is more important than the message.

It helps to think of this in the context of the advent of radio. Before radio, getting information across vast distances was really tricky. If you were lucky, you'd have access to telegraph. Without it you needed the message to physically travel by mail, courier or someone. With radio, all of a sudden the world was quite smaller and this changed the world in a way that was unexpected. After that, we got TV, telecoms, internet, so we're used to drastic changes like that we seldon realize that medium change actually changes the whole thing as we're too deep living through these times.

Did it help?

Two books I like, they are not recent so you need to read them and reflect if things are still the same today:

• Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.
• Les Technologies de l’intelligence. L’avenir de la pensée à l’ère informatique by Pierre Lévy (Which I had in Portuguese but can't find a translation in English)

Three meta-examples: imagine all computers were Windows computers, that Windows was the only OS, then everyone would take it for granted and it would just be called "the computer". Whatever biases are built into it -- that becomes "normal". People take it for granted, even if its, I dunno -- (bad example) racist or discriminatory.

Figure vs. ground.

Second example: facebook: its not what people talk about on facebook (not the "messages") but the very architecture of facebook, and the way it shapes conversation. Perhaps this seems obvious and trite to us now, but Marshall McLuhan was writing in an era when it was not obvious - when mass media and television seemed normal, an inevitable part of the background.

Third example: what we call "money" today is really "fractional reserve currency banking", and is just only one kind of money, but has become so utterly dominant, that almost everyone has forgotten that something else is possible. This was not always the case -- in the 19th century, it was very different. The modern conception of money very much shapes the business boom and bust and capitalist cycles, and it need not actually be like that.

thanks all for the lively contributions.

i have yet to dive into the resources which you have shared, so please feel free to let me know if you think this is covered in those materials, but i haven't seen mention to how far the concept of "media" extends.

For example are laws or philosophies considered media within this framing?

extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment.

@mix I think this is where you hinted you were going in your lightning talk but were limited by the...media?

cc: @Linas Dreamy @Mikael Brockman's laptop @SoapDog @luandro @funwhilelost @Borja

Hey @DanHassan thanks for watching my patchy lightning talk. This topic is a central thread or lens I hold so stoked to be talking about it!

First off, I'm a lazy ass academic, I read a little and discuss and extrapolate a lot. I originally encountered the idea listening to this talk by Jonathon Blow about how the gaming industry is evolving : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc
He does a great job of introducing the idea with examples from movies + tv, and then talks about how that relates to free to play games.
Hey @DanHassan thanks for watching my patchy lightning talk. This topic is a central thread or lens I hold so stoked to be talking about it!

First off, I'm a lazy ass academic, I read a little and discuss and extrapolate a lot. I originally encountered the idea listening to this talk by Jonathon Blow about how the gaming industry is evolving : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc
He does a great job of introducing the idea with examples from movies + tv, and then talks about how that relates to free to play games.

I may have read other things around this lightly but not to much. I feel totally licensed to fork and mutate the idea... no-one has told me I'm too off-piste yet!

Here's my current hot take

I think about medium as in "medium via which things act on other things". a.k.a. substrate / format / protocol. With this broad definition we could cover : music as a mode, or CD based music vs Spotify based music, or legal structures, or cryptography.

You know the phrase "cypherspace is the space made possible by cryptography". That is the medium is the message. Unpacking that sentence more :

Cypherspace is the possibility-space of interactions which is made possible by cryptography.

But further to that, the possibility space isn't of uniform topology... it's a terrain which has different contours than did previous media (e.g. plaintext). Many domains of study talk about energy landscapes (or topologies), e.g. biochemistry, physics, machine learning

The idea is that the height represents energy states, so lower in the graph = lower energy = more stable. In this topology you can imagine if you put a marble at the top is would clunk around but end up in that low point there in the graph.
In our case the marble might represent "how are we communicating with friends", and the shape of that landscape is being created by many variables - where/ when we are in the world, what our socio-economic status is, how much awareness of s
I may have read other things around this lightly but not to much. I feel totally licensed to fork and mutate the idea... no-one has told me I'm too off-piste yet!

Here's my current hot take

I think about medium as in "medium via which things act on other things". a.k.a. substrate / format / protocol. With this broad definition we could cover : music as a mode, or CD based music vs Spotify based music, or legal structures, or cryptography.

You know the phrase "cypherspace is the space made possible by cryptography". That is the medium is the message. Unpacking that sentence more :

Cypherspace is the possibility-space of interactions which is made possible by cryptography.

But further to that, the possibility space isn't of uniform topology... it's a terrain which has different contours than did previous media (e.g. plaintext). Many domains of study talk about energy landscapes (or topologies), e.g. biochemistry, physics, machine learning

The idea is that the height represents energy states, so lower in the graph = lower energy = more stable. In this topology you can imagine if you put a marble at the top is would clunk around but end up in that low point there in the graph.
In our case the marble might represent "how are we communicating with friends", and the shape of that landscape is being created by many variables - where/ when we are in the world, what our socio-economic status is, how much awareness of surveillance there is, and in our particular example what encryption does to that space.

So we're watching over the past 10 years as this marble (communication amongst our friends) rolls around, and we've seen the rise of the smart phone and messaging apps and it has opened new possibility spaces - I can leave the house without a plan and make it up as I move. I can broadcast an event and people can say "maybe", I can meet strangers in a 1 mile radius and make out with them. The message isn't the dick picks or the short messages we're sending, the message is the fact that the substrate of our communicate has changed our culture, our ways if interacting.

The rant about energy topologies is that this is always changing - just because snapchat was popular doesn't mean it's the end point, we're still rolling. The same is especially true with crypherspace - there's a rise in awareness (and demand) for e2e encryption, for companies to have no access to what it is we've written, but the really whack stuff that we're only starting to dable with is content addressable storage.... content that is no longer bound to location... it has true names. The ramifications of that are far reaching and I have some idea of what it's could do to society, but who knows exactly yet.

SORRY - that last message got a bad copypasta in the middle of it. TRY THIS:

Hey @DanHassan thanks for watching my patchy lightning talk. This topic is a central thread or lens I hold so stoked to be talking about it!

First off, I'm a lazy ass academic, I read a little and discuss and extrapolate a lot. I originally encountered the idea listening to this talk by Jonathon Blow about how the gaming industry is evolving : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc
He does a great job of introducing the idea with examples from movies + tv, and then talks about how that relates to free to play games.

I may have read other things around this lightly but not to much. I feel totally licensed to fork and mutate the idea... no-one has told me I'm too off-piste yet!

Here's my current hot take

I think about medium as in "medium via which things act on other things". a.k.a. substrate / format / protocol. With this broad definition we could cover : music as a mode, or CD based music vs Spotify based music, or legal structures, or cryptography.

You know the phrase "cypherspace is the space made possible by cryptography". That is the medium is the message. Unpacking that sentence more :

Cypherspace is the possibility-space of interactions which is made possible by cryptography.

But further to that, the possibility space isn't of uniform topology... it's a terrain which has different contours than did previous media (e.g. plaintext). Many domains of study talk about energy landscapes (or topologies), e.g. biochemistry, physics, machine learning

The idea is that the height represents energy states, so lower in the graph = lower energy = more stable. In this topology you can imagine if you put a marble at the top is would clunk around but end up in that low point there in the graph.
In our case the marble might represent "how are we communicating with friends", and the shape of that landscape is being created by many variables - where/ when we are in the world, what our socio-economic status is, how much awareness of surveillance there is, and in our particular example what encryption does to that space.

So we're watching over the past 10 years as this marble (communication amongst our friends) rolls around, and we've seen the rise of the smart phone and messaging apps and it has opened new possibility spaces - I can leave the house without a plan and make it up as I move. I can broadcast an event and people can say "maybe", I can meet strangers in a 1 mile radius and make out with them. The message isn't the dick picks or the short messages we're sending, the message is the fact that the substrate of our communicate has changed our culture, our ways if interacting.

The rant about energy topologies is that this is always changing - just because snapchat was popular doesn't mean it's the end point, we're still rolling. The same is especially true with crypherspace - there's a rise in awareness (and demand) for e2e encryption, for companies to have no access to what it is we've written, but the really whack stuff that we're only starting to dable with is content addressable storage.... content that is no longer bound to location... it has true names. The ramifications of that are far reaching and I have some idea of what it's could do to society, but who knows exactly yet.

Cont'd

So I think of humans / society like a big pile of ants crawling all over this space and with enough time and jostling we'll tend to form some pattern with the landscape we're currently in - e.g if we don't have boats we'll walk around the lake, when we have boats we might go straight over. (yeah I just added water to the energy topology thing ... ignore that).

There's a degree of fatalism about this, but it's not that straight forward because there are so many variable involved that the landscape is always changing - e.g. if climate crisis become a big thing, and we have mass migration starting, then mobile phones are going to become even more dominant, and so is offline-first communication. Our expectations of how we communicate will change, and our ways of speaking + organising will if there's different latency...

So the contour can and is changing, and just because there's a lowest (most stable) point doesn't mean we'll reach it - there might be a big range in the way that we just don't have enough motivation of visibility to get over. Concrete example is that story about VHS vs BetaMax. It could have been that BetaMax was the better technology, but the porn industry chose to start mass producing content on VHS. This changed the landscape and meant we never really saw BetaMax.

what would you do differently next lightning talk?

Prepare more: as in make better slides, practice writing and speaking about the ideas more to find better / clearer ways to convey them, and to be able to speak more confidently with less "ummmm"s.

I wanted to just start talking about about identity and colonisation, because they felt important, and the reading and conversations I'd been having had stirred things up inside me. I knew the talk would be a bit rocky ... the last conference talk I did was like this too, it took me 3-4 goes of giving the talk at events to really nail the ideas - to connect them clearly, find a path through them, and do it in a way which was (I thought) accessible and exciting (as opposed to angry and a downer).

I want to continue to learn about identity and colonisation. I'm in the process of telling people about this and it's already generating a lot of connections with both people to talk to, and places I should be putting my energy e.g. engaging with the emerging discourse on digital identity in NZ.

I'm lucky to be surrounded by people who are already working on this, so it feels like I'm going to be going deep quite a lot quicker than expected! (it's not luck, it's the result of a succession of values based decisions which has brought us to settle in the same neighbourhood)

@mix yes, technology opens new spaces, but part of what McLuhan is saying (and is perhaps the part that @dan hassan is most interested in, is how the new media is pervasive, subconscious, and acts on society unawares. It's in the background, it defines what is "normal", and is so thoroughly "normal" that it's unnoticable and hard to talk about. No one ever says "oh hey, there's air in this room, and I can breath it!". It just is. The "technology" of an oxidative atmosphere shaped microbial life billions of years ago, and here we are, taking it for granted.

Fast-forward and go meta more than a few times, and you get to the topics that Dan likes to talk about: white fragility and SJW and identity politics -- this is coming to the fore because the air is changing in the room. Topics like institutional #racism are so hard to talk about because, like air, its very nearly invisible, its hard to become consciously aware of it. (and thus, it's existence is denied ...) In a sense, it was invisible, until the invention of social media forced it into awareness. (conscious social, sociological awareness) This "change in the air we breathe" is what is currently roiling society: its no longer culture wars of right vs. left, liberal vs. conservative, but a meelee between a hundred different tribes and world-views and perceptions of reality.

To bridge back to technology: so crypto and cryptocurrency has brought back into (social/sociological) awareness of money and monetary systems, and the pervasive background effects that it has. Now, bitcoin has turned out to be a kind of really bad idea, but it has opened up social awareness that there are indeed other possibilities.

This is the media, the sensory media: literally, as that thing the sits between external "reality" and the inner brain: it is the device through which we perceive. So maybe "air" is a bad example; I should have said skin or ears or eyes. It's not what you see, its the fact that you can see. And the question: how does society change, when we have a new way of perceiving things?

@Borja "(here’s a short summary that I believe focuses on the key points of the book)"

Really liked this. thanks.

@mix " I originally encountered the idea listening to this talk by Jonathon Blow about how the gaming industry is evolving : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc
He does a great job of introducing the idea with examples from movies + tv, and then talks about how that relates to free to play games.
I may have read other things around this lightly but not to much. I feel totally licensed to fork and mutate the idea… no-one has told me I’m too off-piste yet!"

I watched this this afternoon (sped up to 1.75 was still parsable) and i am impressed that the talk has sent you off with a new lens as you've made your way over topographies :) it's fun to have an insight into resources which have had profound effects on peers.

It also did help to clarify some things for me and I think I'll keep wrestling with it till I come up with something coherent. I'll make a first parse now as I seem to be in an ssb post making mood which is rare these days.

• in Blow's comparisons of structural forces changing the shape of the content/message of tv over time (syndication, adverts) it would be interesting to see tv from places outside USA (India, UAE) where different cultures and laws would exert different structural effects.
• Blow contested that the medium you interact with as a builder will change your conciousness (if you spend 40 hrs a week relating to your audience in a particular way this will change how you see your audience / people).

Basically I am coming at this as structures around class, abelism, race, whiteness, supremacy in all its forms is the medium. These effect the shape of our perceptions and shape what we can see and interpret. I am sure someone out there has written on this in a more coherent way - probably one to ask @teq
or @manni

p.s. I found the game about the border guards fucking weird

this one @DanHassan ? https://store.steampowered.com/app/239030/Papers_Please/

@alanna has played that, and her descriptions of it have me too scared to play it.

this one @DanHassan ? https://store.steampowered.com/app/239030/Papers_Please/

@alanna has played that, and her descriptions of it have me too scared to play it.

yes, that one. i found it mind blowing he used it as an example.

Basically I am coming at this as structures around class, abelism, race, whiteness, supremacy in all its forms is the medium. These effect the shape of our perceptions and shape what we can see and interpret.

OOOOOH. I think I am talking about fractal mediums.

@dan hassan
I went through a McLuhan phase in college & read Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, Mechanical Bride, & a couple others. Explanations in this thread have been pretty good, but there's a big aspect that I haven't seen mentioned (though I skimmed some comments so I might have missed it).

Specifically: different media have different biases about what kinds of messages can be more easily transmitted & recieved through them, and at scale, these biases are inherited by people who get most of their information through said media.

A trivial example: radio is not very good at transmitting pictures -- the best one can do is give a physical description -- so anything visual that's also hard to describe in words simply won't be understood by avid radio listeners.

A more nuanced example (and one that McLuhan used a lot without really explaining properly -- one that's confusing today) is the difference between film & the kind of broadcast TV that people had access to in the 60s. To watch a film, you go into a darkened theatre, and there, much larger than life, is an extremely high-fidelity image (until quite recently it wasn't possible to get the kind of fidelity in digital images that you can with film), and you see (generally speaking) a complete story of about two hours, uninterrupted. Everything on film is glamorous in a way, simply because it's very big & bright & you can see more detail than you normally would if you were seeing the thing in reality because an expert is guiding your focus and attention to only important things. Meanwhile, in the 60s, a TV screen would have been quite small, it probably wouldn't have been in color but if it was you'd get color bleed because of the way color is encoded in analog TV signals, and radio interference would make it so the image was often so noisy that it was impossible to say with certainty what was supposed to be on the screen; TV broadcasts tend to tell much shorter stories, interrupted by ads, where the audience isn't necessarily expected to see the whole episode let alone previous ones. Therefore, the two media are good for different things: because of how much more information you get with film, you can have the idea of 'auteur' films -- a filmmaker can only be seen to be in total control of a film because a film has almost total control over its audience -- and at the same time, the messiness of television means that TV viewers need to use their imaginations & really give TV the benefit of the doubt, putting more of themselves into the TV watching experience & seeing reflected back stuff they themselves imagined.

This sort of extends to power relations. If a certain medium is dominant, then the people who are best able to consume that medium are the best-informed people & the people who are best able to create it are the most culturally powerful people. The shift from orality to literacy didn't just mean that stuff that had previously been in flux becam solidified as a canon, but also that power shifted from people who could memorize large amounts of poetry and recite it entertainingly to people who were able to sit for long periods of time, read without moving their lips, write legibly, and afford manuscripts. Print accelerated some of these things but not others: books got cheaper and writing legibly mattered less, but the availability of books meant literacy became more common & more readers meant more writers which in turn meant a greater variety of written material, so it mattered a lot more whether or not you could read quickly and for a long period of time. Print brought with it changing norms around scholarship: since references could now be checked, your authority as an academic depended on checking and citing references, and this led to the development of new media within printed writing with their own biases in both power and information flow: alphabetical indexes, library catalogues, dictionaries, collections of epigrams, eventually encyclopedias and card catalogues and numeric cataloguing systems...

@warkruid thank you for this segway.

I am trying to explore the medium of societal structures that photography emerged within ( @teq this is what I meant by fractal mediums - though perhaps this is a case of inheritance and a hierarchy actually, rather than or as well as fractal).

So photography emerged within the medium of a time in history (laws, colonialism, imperialism, biases etc). As such the ethics/politics and biases of the time and the people involved in producing with embued the medium of photgraphy with, for example, racist tendencies/affordances. See the racial bias of photography. What goes in effects what comes out, right?

We can see these same patterns over time. For example the soap dispenser which would not dispense soap to black people or the infamous google photo recognition AI which classified Black people as gorillas.

In the same way that business models (advertising and syndication) effect the medium, so too do the social structures that technologies emerge within.

I am still talking about the medium is the message?

cc: @mix @teq @manni @enkiv2 @Linas Dreamy @Mikael Brockman's laptop @soapy 🐶 @luandro @funwhilelost @Borja

FYI I have sourced a copy of No Sense of Place and Understanding Media, so I apologise if this is actually all covered in those materials. Trying to feel my way into the boundaries of this way of thinking.

edit: ^sourced but not yet read

@dan hassan,

In my opinion what you're talking is important but it is not what people mean by the medium is the message. What you're talking is about reinforcement of prejudices (sometimes by accident) in technology. It is a different conversation. The cornerstone of the medium is the message is how new media change society due to the new nature of the medium and not exactly due to its content (which tends to be always the same).

For example photography introduced two important things in the world:

• Instant capture (when compared to painting)
• Fetish for fidelity/realism

In which the whole world became enamored with the idea or value that photography had of portraying reality as it is even though it can't carry nothing but visual representation of something the photographer decided to frame. Another important aspect is the capacity for faithful reproduction. From one negative, you can produce faithful copies of that image. This trend of reproduction was already a thing due to the printing press. But it changed everything because allowed the world to have cheap copies of stuff. Once art is cheap and reproducible, what is the value of art? Once it was the uniqueness of a piece, now it is something else...

What you described is more about the people building tech or using it than the tech itself. In the case of the image recognition. The problem lies in the models used for training, which is a result of lack of foresight by the teams involved.

A more recent case for the medium is the message for me are social networks. We still use them to talk the same shit we used to in letter sections in magazines and by trading postcards and emails. The conversations are all the same. But it destroyed modern democracy, it is wrecking journalism, and it is leading to a post-truth world.

@warkruid I don't think we're differing here. What I'm saying via my understanding of McLuhan is that the change in the medium is more important and causes more impact than the change of messages that follow later.

It is important to look at my message in the context of the thread which is very specific to the thesis of Marshall McLuhan which says that the medium is the message and people who haven't been into his writings tend to infer that he is talking about content when he is really talking about the medium itself and its disruptive changes. A big part of understanding his stuff is analyzing how radio changed the world.

The conversations are all the same? No! The media has become part of the conversation. (And the language changes and suffers for it I think.) Think internet memes, avatars, icons, and so so much more.

It still the same conversation. Memes, avatars, icons didn't started with social media. We used them all the way back to BBS before the internet. And probably before that as well but I was not alive to remember. Also when you mention media there, you might want to check that memes, avatars, icons are not part of internet culture anymore. They are just culture. You see plush emoji for sale at primark, icons in all subway iconography. Those are not new and they haven't changed society drastically when compared to the advent of radio or the internet which were medium changes that changed everything.

It destroyed democracy? I don’t know. It is certainly changing society.

The fact that you can't employ enough fact checkers to counter the mass distribution of fake news to swindle the democratic process kind makes the democratic process quite difficult.

It is wrecking journalism? Oh Yes!

I'm married to a journalist, I hear about it a lot.

Is it leading to a Post-Truth world?. I’ve no idea what that even means at this point.

Pick some point in time 20 years ago. You'd get vaccinated, Space probes flying around. Evolution was mostly accepted as a leading theory because we don't name things as law anymore. Now, pick this week. Scientists need to go on TV to tell people that the Earth is fucking round. Long erradicated diseases are making comebacks because someone on youtube is yelling against vaccines. Schools are refusing to teach scientific topics that contradict their religious beliefs. Politicians can go on record saying whatever the shit they want and claim later that they never said that and that whatever you're showing them as proof of truth is fake news...