https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1axnba_Ueg
51:55 min video
or: https://archive.org/details/thisismarshallmcluhanthemediumisthemessage/thisismarshallmcluhanthemediumisthemessagereel1/thisismarshallmcluhanthemediumisthemessagereel1.mov
in 2 parts
#medium #message #MarshallMcLuhan #McLuhan
S.I. Hayakawa and General Semantics (1968)
I've had a few recommendations to look at the work of Hayakawa. He was an english professor, university president, and senator (from California). A decidedly eclectic mix.
The quote above comes at the opening of this lecture, discussing the revolution in media which had occurred at the opening of the 20th century. Highly recommended.
I'd come to the realisation of the significance of media and its role on society and politics a few years ago. I keep running into validation of that notion.
McLuhan isn't mentioned AFAICT though he makes similar points. See also #HannaArendt and the #FrankfurtSchool
https://youtube.com/watch?v=W0VdNQVlg7U
I've also queued up
(YouTube recommendations are proving interesting here.)
#SIHayakawa #Media #radio #politics #fascism #populism #MarshallMcLuhan
I've become increasily aware of how conversation medium and participants shapes the "quality" of conversation.
Conversation scales poorly.
It's also fragile and very easily destroyed, discouraged, or dissuaded.
The biggest issue I find on Reddit itself is that there's no notion of "thread (or post) as conversation". And absolutely no support for same. Reddit is where interesting conversations go to die.
An item is posted. It's at top-of-page for ... a few minutes or hours, possibly days ... then vanishes And no amount of activity within a thread will boost it, generally. Even those who'd participated in the discussion have no signal of any activity. The best that can happen is that members might subscribe to replies for two days. This is madness.
Put another way, Reddit's post-weighting algorithm is all but entirely determined by posting time, not activity recency. This avoids "necroposting", for both good and bad. For small niche discussion, all but entirely bad.
Problem is that Reddit's scale spans about 6-8 orders of magnitude -- subredduts of < 10 members, to > 10,000,000. One-size-fits all ... wears poorly. Most of the glaring problems are at large scale. The small subs get neglected. Clue flees.
The little-lamented Imzy had the problem of seeing Reddit's problems-at-scale, whilst utterly failing to grasp its own failures-at-inception --- no scale --- and failing to address those. Put another way, how you get to scale, by solving the problems of inception, teaches you nothing about hoe to survive at scale. The problems are entirely different.
As noted at HN, for all its copious faults, Google+ solved this particular problem well. Facebook may also (I don't use it). Microblogging platforms (Twitter, Mastodon, Fediverse) at least present individual posts within a thread well, though they seem to uniformly suck at actual threading (see: Threadreader). Diaspora ... kind of does this but was an immensely clunky slow interface for notifications & response.
But yes, as McLuhan said, "the medium is the message". It has profound impacts and influences, most not immediately apparent -- they're emergent properties.
Independent of medium, scale, expressive richness (e.g., markdown, multimedia), latency, arity, ephemerality / permanence, message size, moderation (leaf-node or trunk), culture, founding cohort, exogenous vs. endogenous motivators and incentives (or demotivators and disincentives), editability/revisability, search, organisation and management tools, protocols and standards, and much more, all matter.
I've discussed some of this at the (rather neglected) discussion of social media types and characteristics at Plexodus Wiki, see especially Platform Types and Features and Capabilities.
Adapted from a private Reddit discussion.
#media #conversations #generativity #MarshallMcLuhan #reddit #twitter #hackernews #mastodon #fediverse #diaspora #usenet #moderation #googlplus #gplus #plexodus #plexoduswiki
So what! AJ has produced videos to educate the masses, so what! enjoy it :)
Working with journalists, artists and political activists from Africa, Latin America, Asia, the United States and Europe, #AlJazeera have created five videos supplemented by essays to introduce you to media theorists and to help you apply some of their critical tools in your everyday encounters with the media.
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2017/the-listening-post-media-theorised/index.html
