The Collective Mind: How did we get from an Acheulian axe to iPhone

September 15, 2011 By 3 Comments

Consider two tools, one is a stone tool, an Acheulian axe, that has been around for at least a million years. Another is a communication tool, an iPhone, which has been around for about 5 years. Both tools have similarities – they are hand sized, fit in our palm perfectly, and are considered among the most important technologies of their days. The differences are more dramatic. The axe is made of stone and can be used for shaping, cutting, and hunting. The phone is an elaborate combination of plastics, metals, silicon and sophisticated software that allows us to take and share pictures and videos, communicate in real time, listen to music, transfer money and purchase products, check weather forecasts, play games, send texts, and place international phone calls. The possibilities of a smartphone are endless.

iX-ray
Creative Commons License photo credit: slowburn♪

How did we achieve such progress? Not easily. According to Matt Ridley, the author of “The Rational Optimist”, the stone tool was the only technology for more than a thousand millennia and the bodies and brains of prehistoric men changed faster than their tools. Only later in our history did people begin developing newer and better technologies such as the fishing rod, the wheel and agricultural tools. The rate of invention has accelerated rapidly during the past two centuries.

The development of communication technologies was central to this change.  For centuries the fastest way to deliver information was on a horseback. Still, people would wait for their mail for days, weeks and even months. The materials needed for such information dissemination were scarce too: horses were expensive, paper and ink were not readily available for everyone, and people overall had less than desired literacy levels.

The invention of Gutenberg printing press changed the way information was produced, however the dissemination of information was still relatively slow. The optical telegraph was invented in France in the 18th century. Multiple towers were built around the country. Messages were delivered by conveying visual signals: a sender would send the message; a recipient of the next tower would get the message while looking at a telescope and transfer it to a person sitting on the top of another tower and so on. On a good clear day, a message could reach from Paris to the South of France in one day, on a gloomy day it would take longer. The quality of messages was below optimal as a lot of errors were made along the way. Soon enough, optical telegraphs were replaced with electric telegraphs, and the first transatlantic message was sent in the 19th century. After that, the speed of transmitting information became faster and cheaper almost every decade. The radio, telephones, television and finally the Internet lowered the cost of communication, and made information fast and pervasive. Later, mobile technologies connected people around the world including countries that previously did not have even land lines. Faster means of communication allowed people to share ideas more easily, further accelerating the rate of technological innovation.

Ridley explores the notion of “collective intelligence” as a driver of innovation. The stone tool required the creativity and skills of one person and was made of one material – the rock. The smartphone tool needs the creativity and skills of thousands of people. Phones are made mainly of plastics, metals, ceramics and glass. To produce these materials copper, gold, lead, nickel, zinc, beryllium, tantalum, lithium, cadmium, crude oil, limestone and various liquid crystalline substances are required. These materials are mined, combined with other materials in a processing plant and shipped to the manufacturer. Software developers write various applications using computers and servers that are produced by others who use a range of materials in their work. Nano technologists, quantum physicists, inventors, entrepreneurs, marketers, advertisers and countless other people contribute to the creation of a single device.

Natural curiosity forces us to come up with better communication solutions and the advancements in communication technologies has allowed us to use our minds collectively to produce a wider range of goods. With advancements in technology we are able to create elaborate and complicated tools in a short period of time because we draw upon the knowledge of multiple people. Although no one person can recreate these tools on her own due to their complexity, the collective knowledge generated by people enables creativity and innovation. Non-experts with great ideas now find it easier to collaborate with experienced specialists, and to contribute greatly to the emergence of new technologies that may enrich people’s lives, while helping us progress even further from the Acheulian axe.

Filed Under: Technology, To Ponder, Tools Tagged With: , , , ,

Talons: A Case Study in DIY Educational Technology

June 17, 2011 By 2 Comments

On June 9, 2011, students in the music program at Gleneagle Secondary School, a high school in Vancouver suburb Coquitam, BC, played its spring concert to a packed house in a 450 seat auditorium. A first in Gleneagle history, the performance was broadcast live over Internet radio to listeners all over the world. And while  that might sound like a huge undertaking requiring serious AV and IT infrastructure, it was not. Not at all. In a brilliant feat of do-it-yourself EdTech (or what some folks might have once called edupunk), the concert was streamed live by Bryan Jackson, a Music and English teacher in the school’s TALONS program, and graduating senior Olga Belikov, with a Macbook, some free software and a USB microphone. That’s it. That’s all it took to broadcast the spring concert to anyone anywhere who wanted to hear it. And it sounded great.

Gleneagle’s Principal was aware of what was going on but wasn’t entirely clear on the details. During one point in the concert, he  walked backstage where Bryan explained all the moving parts: the unremarkable laptop and microphone, the free software, the web radio station (DS106Radio — read about it in my last post and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), how he and Olga used Twitter to build a live audience of listeners from from all over the US and Canada, and  that the broadcast was being recorded and would be posted for posterity to Soundcloud, a free audio sharing site, so that anyone in the Gleneagle community or anyone else anywhere could listen to and respond to any part of the performance. Bryan also explained how he had been using various other social media tools at Gleneagle including YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, blogs, and web radio to enhance lessons, to share performances, and to communicate with students and colleagues. His Principal was duly impressed. The administration had been aware of and supported Bryan’s and other teachers’ use of social media but had never up to this point fully engaged their potential to increase engagement, promote programs, and share and interact with parents, teachers, students, and district administrators or anyone else. While they had an inkling of what teachers were doing with free web tools, this broadcast, its recording, and the new interest at the school in webcasting were, according to Bryan, probably the first tangible outcomes of Gleneagle teachers’ experiments with creating and sharing on the web. Here is a one minute audio clip of Bryan describing the Principal’s visit backstage:

Bryan Jackson on Broadcasting the Spring Concert

I love the irony here: Bryan tells us that he was able to experiment with various social media and web publishing tools and explore how their use might benefit his program and school only because one of the school’s IT people gave him his computer’s administrative password, which he really wasn’t supposed to have. It’s fairly common practice for IT departments in companies and educational institutions to withhold admin access to computers from end users for fear that they will go messing where they shouldn’t and damage the computer, contract a virus, install unauthorized software, or do things on their machines of which the IT department or the institution does not approve. This also ensures that end users have to rely upon IT personnel to perform simple maintenance tasks, modify configurations, and to update or install software. This is the traditional model where IT is in control of who has access and who does not while the end users are disempowered and must rely upon IT to make any changes to their machines. Here’s a wonderful example of a teacher who was trusted with full access to his computer and was able to use it to break new ground without hinderances imposed from above. When creative teachers have the latitude to experiment with the technology that’s readily available to them, wonderful things can happen. If there was ever an argument in favor of rethinking the model of how and to whom administrative access is granted at educational institutions, this is it.

I don’t know much about the general feeling at Gleneagle toward the privacy and security implications of web publishing and social media in instruction and for promotional purposes so I can’t speak to that. But it seems to me that, generally, there’s still quite a bit of trepidation about such things among educators. That trepidation, I’ll argue, tends to grow out of 20th Century notions of public exposure and our relationship with mass media and their roles in our lives. Privacy and security are certainly real concerns (FERPA exists for a reason), but it does appear that the discourse around them is often animated by outdated ideas about the production and consumption of media. It used to be that if you appeared on TV or radio, or in print, you had done or were involved in something a small group of editors and producers felt it was their imperative to broadcast. It had to be fairly remarkable, for good or for ill, to make the papers. Having your image or story broadcast to the world via a mass medium like radio or television, was special — something fairly unusual in the “look, Mom, I’m on TV!” sort of a way, unless you were among the relatively few who made a living in front of a camera or microphone.

Now, when anyone can shoot a video on a mobile phone and upload it immediately to YouTube, where it can potentially be seen by thousands, if not millions of people within just a few days, there’s a real banality to this sort of exposure. Most of our students share their lives on the internet in some way  every day. More and more of them live their lives in both physical and virtual space — this is something that those of us in their 30s and 40s who teach and administer programs are just now getting our heads around. Whats more, the means of media production, it has been said again and again by new media thinkers like Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky and a host of others, are now in the hands of everyday people, no longer just media professionals. With relatively little effort and technical expertise, anyone can publish to the web. Anyone can broadcast audio or video to the internet on a mobile phone and an application that costs almost nothing. Heck, a bunch of us edtechhers built an open community radio station out of nothing more than a $25/mo server and a desire to play radio DJ.

Bryan Jackson and his colleagues at Gleneagle understand this well and are making amazing use of it. Thanks to a leadership that seems to appreciate the possibility the new media order offers educators, they have been empowered to use a combination of social media to do on their own what once was the province of AV professionals and marketing departments and required substantial infrastructure. While we’re by now used to seeing inklings of this sort of thing on the post-secondary level, it is encouraging and inspiring to see in happen in K-12. Bravo, Gleneagle Music! Bravo!

[This post is cross posted at my personal blog, thisevilempire.com]

Filed Under: Audience, Computer Mediated Instruction, EdTech, Education, edupunk, Internet, Media, Music, Social Media, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Saign flls aftr US wthdrwl OMFG

February 15, 2011 By 4 Comments

Valentine Greeting: Grandpa to Grandma
Creative Commons License photo credit: freeparking

I was doing research for my dissertation at the National Archives a few months ago when I came across a set of “communications files” for General William Westmoreland, a central military planner during the Vietnam War and later Army Chief of Staff.  The files contained all kinds of communications, mostly letters, spanning Westmoreland’s tenure as administrative head of the Army during the final years of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia.

Unfortunately for my dissertation, I didn’t find anything in the file that directly helped my project.  However, one folder in particular caught my attention more for its form than its content. A collection of papers marked “Wire Transcripts, 1968-72″ contained all of Westmoreland’s communications via wire service, or telegram, and when I opened the folder I was immediately struck by the uncanny sense that I was looking at a Twitter feed.  The pithy, often awkwardly abbreviated transmissions closely resembled the loose, stream-of-consciousness format that Tweets, status updates, and text messages have made ubiquitous.  As I browsed through Westmoreland’s proto-tweets, the effect was like reading an internal history of the Vietnam War broken down to its linguistic essence, and I realized that the impulse to communicate in incredibly short textual bursts was not unique to the Internet Age.

As I approach teaching a history course on Vietnam this summer, I wonder if the tweet-format can have uses in the classroom. Since so many writing exercises attempt to teach students how to organize their thoughts into one powerful central thesis (often in the form of a a single sentence), the informal language of text messaging might provide a natural springboard to develop that process.  A good example of how loads of meaning can be packed into 140 characters is found in these “Twitter Discographies,” which break down entire musical careers into nearly mathematical, often brilliant, aesthetic summaries.  A personal favorite, Neil Young, looks like this:

Neil Young: 1 shak(e)y; 2+3 yin/yang of entire career; 4 the hit; 5-7, 14 fucked-up genius; 8-13,20-33 yin/yang variations; 15-19 the ditch.

While most students already have a great deal of practice composing text messages, how might they benefit from exploring this format in an academic setting?  Are there ways to engage the same critical faculties involved in writing a five-paragraph essay in, let’s say, an exercise that asks students to reduce the Tet Offensive to a series of tweets?

Filed Under: Pedagogy, Twitter Tagged With: ,

The Humanities Drive; Skills Ride Along

May 4, 2010 By 2 Comments

I am going to reveal a hope of mine; I have long kept this hope closeted, as it seems very likely to bring me disgrace. I hope that Writing Across the Curriculum and Communication Across the Curriculum programs might one day render Composition obsolete.

The development of a specialized knowledge of writing instruction has been one of the most important achievements of higher education in the last forty years. This specialized knowledge of how to teach students to write will remain important. In fact, the incredible utility of this knowledge means that it cannot be confined to specialists! The birth of WAC, analogous to the invention of the web-link, has the potential to completely transform the way we conceive of the essential material of higher education. No longer can we isolate writing instruction to language classes. Could this be the idea that reverses a hundred-and-twenty year trend of increasing specialization in the curriculum?

Okay. So, once again, I have resorted to polemic (here, in the form of a strange sort-of-Hegelean fantasy). However, my conviction is a serious one. The humanities are ill served by the teaching of writing prior to the more fundamental questions. Why are we here, what do we do, how do we form the bases for our beliefs? These deeper questions, which students ponder on their own, are seldom addressed in their course work in Humanities disciplines, even though these are the questions that motivate humanistic study.

I have, tentatively, shared these ideas with my colleagues. The ideas are not well received. “If you can’t write, you can’t think. How can you work on big ideas if you can hardly sort out your words into sentences or your sentences into paragraphs?”

Further confession: I am either so prescient or so far-fetched in my thinking that I even like to imagine WAC and CAC will lead to curricular solutions to the economic problems of today’s higher education in the humanities. There are too many graduate students. Graduate education takes too long. Professorships become scarce as institutions increasingly rely on adjunct- and other temporary appointments. Meanwhile, enrollments continue to climb, especially at junior and community colleges. A caste system has formed where only “the best” professors can teach original courses, and an underclass of highly educated professionals prepare the masses by running them through a byzantine system of prerequisites for contact with the elite specialists.

Specialization in the sciences is important. In the humanities, specialization is like a derivatives market; it takes something that has a basic function, and, in trying to increase the wealth this thing produces, it fouls the thing’s basic functionality.

Let every graduate teach what he wants, but have him also armed to teach writing. Instead of, “how can you work on big ideas if you can’t write a sentence,” let it be demanded, “how can you build advanced knowledge, if you can’t teach basic writing?” The system of levels and prerequisites will fall away. The humanities will drive, and skills will ride along.

Is this really such a disgraceful idea?

Filed Under: Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Higher Education, Pedagogy, teaching, To Ponder, What if . . ., Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How blunt is too blunt?

February 24, 2010 By 4 Comments

Untitled
Creative Commons License photo credit: morgan childers

A professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, recently sent an email that has gone viral, due largely to its unique approach in response to a student’s particularly obnoxious behavior.  The student, who remains anonymous, had arrived an hour late to class and been denied admission, and later emailed the professor to explain that he was late because he had been “sampling” different classes, the last of which was Professor Galloway’s, and that it was within his rights to explore different options at the beginning of the semester.

Galloway’s response has caught attention because of his brutal honesty in addressing what he sees as the student’s overall functional weaknesses.   In short, he takes him down a few notches.  You can read the full exchange here, but I wanted to focus on a specific piece of Galloway’s final advice:

“Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential which, by virtue of you being admitted  to Stern, you must have in spades. It’s not too late xxxx…”

Opinion on the web seems split, mainly centered on Galloway’s known personality quirks.  The entire controversy, though, provides an opportunity to think about the appropriate tone and level of “honesty” in student-teacher communications.  As an adjunct at Baruch for five years, I’ve certainly felt the occasional urge to respond to particularly ridiculous requests with a similar sense of disbelief.  Galloway’s message, however, takes the impulse a step further, directly and personally addressing what he perceives to be the student’s overall failures.  His main point seems to be that, by exhibiting such a lack of decorum, the student is effectively handicapping himself, making it impossible to succeed in college or the larger world.

I find Galloway’s response generally appropriate considering the student’s rather arrogant assumption that “sampling” courses (by walking in and out of several classes mid-lecture) was a reasonable behavior.  His most memorable advice (“get your shit together”), while perhaps obscene, communicates an underlying truth.  If the student wishes to succeed in the business world, his presumed career direction, he will have to drastically adjust the attitude and expectations reflected in his brief interaction with Professor Galloway.

On the other hand, is it right to draw larger conclusions about a student’s chances of future success from one embarrassing incident?  Further, is it even within a professor’s rights or responsibilities to dole out such “advice” at all?  How can we effectively steer our students toward more appropriate and “successful” behavior without being too harsh or judgmental?

Filed Under: Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication Tagged With: ,

Let’s talk about talking

November 10, 2009 By 4 Comments

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ti-gkJiXc&feature=related[/youtube]

The above video has been making the rounds of progressive blogs recently.  It features Jay Smooth, a popular New York hip-hop radio host, giving a brief lesson on how best to approach a racially-charged conversation.  In a quick three minutes,  Smooth gives several witty examples of conversational traps to avoid, effectively presenting the difference between the two broad categories of racial discussion:  the “what they did” conversation versus the “what they are” conversation.   The video demonstrates the best way to “call out” racist behavior without leading the conversation into name-calling, by focusing on specific words and actions (“what they did”) rather than drawing broad conclusions (“what they are”).

While Smooth’s clever lecture/sermon focuses on racial issues, it also functions essentially as a primer on how to engage difficult issues with critical intelligence, and as such it has captured the attention of communication-intensive educators (that’s us). According to this interview on NPR, the video has become a hit among college professors, who use Smooth’s rant to help introduce ideas about effective oral communication.  Because the video is hip, funny, and easily understandable, it seems like a decent way to get students talking about talking.

As I’ve noticed in my own classes,  difficulties with in-class discussions are not always related to shy, silent students. Oftentimes, I’ve had boisterous groups that have LOTS to say, but don’t often have the most effective tools for oral communication at their disposal, and the result can be an awkward, pointless (and, at worst, offensive) discussion.  After all, there are many ways to talk about any given issue, but our job is to promote a very specific kind of academic discussion that is most likely very different from the average student’s everyday mode of communication.

Smooth’s video is certainly a great starting point for a classroom discussion about arguments, evidence, and rhetorical strategy, but I think it also provides an opportunity for us, as educators, to begin thinking about our own role in teaching students how to effectively “speak up” in class.  What other tools can we use to help students create meaningful, civil in-class discussions?  How can we get students not just to talk, but to talk with confidence and authority, avoiding the “rhetorical Bermuda Triangle” described in the video?  And finally, is Smooth available for guest lectures?

Filed Under: Oral Communication, Pedagogy Tagged With:

Communication and Flip cameras

January 16, 2009 By 3 Comments

At BLSCI we are currently conducting research into how the use of Flip Cameras could be used in communication pedagogy.

I was able to interview several experts in the field and the following is a selection of several theories on communication and personal belongings…

Filed Under: BLSCI, Oral Communication, Technology Tagged With: ,

A Picture is Worth…

October 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment

In my teaching I have found that students can sometimes be surprisingly credulous about what is being communicated to them by images, whether it’s conveyed by a doctored photo or in the nonverbal message sent by a carefully selected image accompanying a story.   Even my friends who should know better do not always think as critically about images as they might about text.

Here’s an example.  As soon as Sarah Palin got selected as McCain’s running mate, I started getting emails circulating this photo of her:

My first thought was, “how can a middle-aged woman who’s borne several children look that good in a bikini?!”  The people who forwarded this were trustworthy enough, but I knew you can’t always believe what you see, when it comes to online images.  So, I did a little digging and came up with this original, on the blog ‘Urban Legends‘:

The blog author notes that “the resulting montage was obviously intended to satirize Sarah Palin’s image as a ‘gun-toting beauty queen.’” It was an early entry in the contest to come up with the funniest sendup of this suddenly buzz-worthy candidate, though it was soon trumped by the Tina Fey imitations, which used video to even greater effect.

I have used this type of Photoshopped image to help students recognize that they should be cautious about the source and substance of material they find online, including images, and just because they agree with the politics of the sender does not absolve them of the need to think critically.  The not-too-difficult search for the origin of the image also makes a useful, topical lesson for students in how we can use the vast amount of chat, data, news, and info online to check facts against many reliable sources until we come up with something close to ‘the truth.’

Now I have to sign off and go catch up on the news, from my favorite hard news source, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart!

Filed Under: Literacy, Media, Pedagogy, Politics Tagged With: , , ,

Communication and the Campaign

October 6, 2008 By 6 Comments

If Barack Obama is elected President on November 4th, it will be in large part because of the sophisticated way his campaign has communicated with the American public.

I was in Michigan this past weekend, and drove past the “North Oakland County Victory Office” of the McCain Campaign, just west of Pontiac, twenty miles north of Detroit. A placard near the street read “Get your McCain-Palin lawn signs here!” The building looked like a small bait shop, set back from the road, in the middle of a big parking lot with few cars. No one seemed to be there. On a Saturday afternoon. A month before the election.

This could have been a reaction against the McCain campaign deciding to give up on Michigan late last week. But when compared to what I’m reading about Obama’s organization, the two campaigns are running entirely different ground games. A few examples of what Obama’s been doing:

Here’s an ad that the bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley made in support of Obama. It’s in heavy radio rotation in Virginia:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUOfaIyv4Bs

Here’s a report from the Fulton (MO.) Sun, about the Obama campaign’s use of TTY devices to call hard-of-hearing voters.

Here’s a link to the iPhone Obama Application (pictured at right), which sorts contacts by state (putting battlegrounds at the top), and makes it easy for individuals to find their way to campaign events, make calls on behalf of Obama, or get details on the candidate’s take on particular issues.

The Obama campaign bought a tv channel on the Dish Network. Channel 73 will be playing all-Obama programming through the election.

Here’s some reporting on the campaigns from fivethirtyeight.com; a couple of bloggers have visited both campaigns’ offices throughout Colorado and Missouri. Key section:

Let’s be clear. We’ve observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voce, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn’t like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director.

The McCain offices are also calm, sedate. Little movement. No hustle. In the Obama offices, it’s a whirlwind. People move. It’s a dynamic bustle. You can feel it in our photos.

Finally, for those who think Obama’s been too reticent to hit McCain hard: think again. Much of the more aggressive and negative stuff is happening on a subterranean level (although that’s about to change with a national ad on McCain and the Keating Five). Spanish language commercials (radio and tv) are running in New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada tying McCain to Rush Limbaugh, saying he has “dos caras,” or “two faces.” This morning I heard a report featuring a call from a Virginia Obama-supporter to an undecided voter. It began with a reminder that John McCain would be the oldest President ever elected. The caller then brought up the specter of McCain’s death, talked about Sarah Palin’s embarrassing interview with Katie Couric, and then asked the person on the other line if they really want her as their President. In national tv appearances and the debates thus far, in recognition of Obama’s campaign against “politics as usual,” the candidate and his running mate have avoided a negative or derisive tone or even challenging Palin. I think Biden probably could have field dressed Palin last week had he wanted to. Instead, he treated her and her substanceless winking — to paraphrase Garry Shandling– like how “Johnny Carson treated Charo.” (It’s only fair when acknowledging Palin’s winking to also note Biden’s botox. He did, however, answer a few of the questions). At the local level, the Obama campaign has a bit tougher.

There’s a direct correlation between the sophistication of the Obama ground game and the Democratic gains in affiliated voters. In Pennsylvania, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 486,000 in 2000 and 580,000 in 2004. Now? 1.15 million. In Nevada, four years ago Dems trailed by nearly 5000 registrants. They currently hold an 80,000 voter edge. In Florida, the Democrats have added 130,000 more voters than the Republicans over the past four years. If you’re an Obama supporter, those numbers are very encouraging.

Other factors explain this swing, including the unpopularity of the current administration and the downturn in the economy. But it would be foolish to discount the effectiveness of the Obama machine in organizing its base, supporting voter registration (especially among the young), employing technology, and effectively tailoring its message to particular constituencies. Obama and Biden know who their audiences are, and how to speak to them.

McCain Palin

Admittedly, I haven’t been following the McCain campaign as closely as Obama’s, but I’ve seen no evidence that there’s much innovation or energy at its core. Yes, Palin has fired up the Republican base. But has that led to more organizing or a flock of volunteers in key locations? Aside from McCain’s increasingly negative ads and his hope that the economy becomes less central to the campaign, a few yard signs are all I’ve really seen.

* Late update: Ben Smith has a piece in Politico on Obama’s “quiet efforts” to target black voters… subterranean for real.

Filed Under: Audience, Media, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Marshall McLuhan on the Televised Presidential Debate (1976)

September 23, 2008 By 4 Comments

Among the many things were interested in, here at cac.ophony, are the roles of context, genre and different types of media in shaping communication. (The medium is the message, after all.) Given this, and iIn anticipation of the soon to be televised presidential debates, we give you a provocative tidbit to chew on. Here, via if:book, is a remarkable interview with Marshall McLuhan from the Today show in 1976, in which the famed theorist of media analyzes the televised presidential debates of that year and argues that the tried and true genre of the presidential debate is “completely the wrong form for the medium of television.” Bob Stein of if:book notes that

it’s hard to imagine an interview like this on the Today show of 2008. It goes on for ten uninterrupted minutes; there are no cut-aways to video footage or text crawls at the bottom of the screen; and most significantly McLuhan speaks his mind, critical of the mechanisms of political discourse to an extent unimaginable in today’s sanitized mass media landscape.

[youtube]httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF8jej3j5vA[/youtube]

Filed Under: Debating, Media, Politics, Technology Tagged With: , , , , ,