Sad to see the recent upsurge in co-opting of Marshall McLuhan as a pal of blogging. Like irony, McLuhan as icon is one of those things that gets bandied about and forced into uncomfortable alliances - apparently without much concern whether the words he wrote bear any relationship to the claims made. I have only the limited experience of reading a bit of his writing but take from that the key message that new media have unintended and sometimes detrimental consequences - the end of the spitoon and the buggywhip factories, the light bulb and the crimping of our relationship with nature. Few engage those implications when it comes to pajamastan. As usual, it is only hooray for everything.
Lately, it has become trendy to trumpet the end of journalism - today's spitoon workers - vanquished at the hands of citizen bloggers. While laughable, imagine if that were actually to happen. One thing would be the collapse of deriviative blogging itself as mucho bloggerno is only about what those professionals write.
Comments
Marian Evans - March 18, 2005 12:57 PM
I don't think blogging is competition for anything but op-ed type stuff. Op-ed journalism is cheap to produce and there's kind of a lot of it out there.
As for McLuhan, his theory is another one of these form as content thingies. It has nothing specific to say about journalism however (which isn't a technology anyway), so he can't really be made to explain how journalism is doomed because of the arrival of the internet. On the other hand, he might be mildly hopeful about the internet's revival of print even if the form is different, i.e., not words on a page but text on the screen. If you recall, he was a little unhappy with TV which he saw as force for making society less rational. The global village, I think for him had some negative connotations. If I were a McLuhan scholar I might be thinking that the message of the current medium (aka, the internet) is that it might bring back some tendencies towards rationality, cosmopolitanism and individuation because of its current emphasis on text.
One other thing that does have a vaguely McLuhanesque feel to it is the idea that technologies shape societies, as you noted. But it's a stretch to say that we can predict how that will work. The biggest difference so far between the old media and the internet is the ability to talk back to the broadcaster and the ability to produce your own stuff. So, you could speculate that this makes every bozo into an authority. Or more optimistically, you could speculate that it might possibly call into question some false idols.
Alan - March 18, 2005 1:08 PM
Sadly there are more internet bozos to be made into false idols than TV false idols to expose as bozos. The net outsome is not that attractive.
Marian Evans - March 18, 2005 1:09 PM
Actually this second idea that the internet might shape society in this more banal or general way sounds more like Ursula Franklin than McLuhan. She wrote a book called The Real World of Technology which dealt with the shaping of societies by technologies which she conceived broadly as "ways of doing things" (techne) so things like religious practice were also technologies. If you're reading her you could probably spin out a prediction about how the internet will affect journalism that would also see journalism as a technology.
Marian Evans - March 18, 2005 1:13 PM
"Sadly there are more internet bozos to be made into false idols than TV false idols to expose as bozos. The net outsome is not that attractive"
It will probably be a bit of both.
Marian Evans - March 19, 2005 1:07 PM
It can be very disconcerting posting on other people's blogs. Sometimes I make a lot of spelling mistakes which I can't go back and correct. I also can't go back and edit. Up there I notice that I've used the word technology too often. Of course none of this is as embarrassing as the time two weeks ago when I posted a correction on someone's blog concerning the word centrifugal (the details don't matter but the person meant centripetal). Unfortunately in the text of the post I misspelled the word tempus (as in tempus fugit --- I of course wrote "tempest fugit" great dingbat that I am). I know. Tempest is storm, not time. Sigh. I really do know that, most of the time. That's the problem with blogging though: It's too often the product not only of ninnies, but of ninnies who are typing with one hand during breaks between looking after little babies and professional or other obligations we might have. Still, I notice that The Star often has spelling mistakes and that to me is unforgivable since people are paying for this stuff unlike the crap I write here which is a labour if not of love then of I donâ??t know what, pigheadedness?