homo escapeons

THE WEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE


Above all else I am an incurable Coherentist.

My insatiable curiousity compels me to assemble a manageable cosmology.
I want to understand as much of the Who, What, When, Where, Why and HOW I am who Iam..
and why the world around me and everyone in it, is the way IT IS!

I started Blogging because I realised that this medium is amazing. Although I am limited by my brain and all of it's inherited pre & post conditioning, I want to find my Oasis of Homeostasis; a workable balance of unrelated thingamabobs..Coherentism.

And I want it all funnelled into neat and tidy little packages with a ribbon on top...
but I am also very aware that I am an insufferable hodge-podgerist prone to smush ideas and factoids together even if they don't fit.

The fact that YOU are reading this means that you have voluntarily engaged in becoming part of this experience via the Next Wave. This Tofflerian-McLuhanian Matrix known as the Global Village.
We are out here networking because the old model of Hierarchies failed miserably. Blind faith in leaders is no longer acceptable because it doesn't work.

The Information Revolution has levelled the playing field and now any of us can have access to most of the information that our trusted Leaders once used to dominate us.

Why should those grossly over-compensated leaders reap all the rewards when we were doing all the work?

We keep the ball rolling not them.
Enough of that bullsh*t!

So here we are. Information is and always has been the most powerful form of currency on the planet. We are attempting to attain control over our lives..something no other generation has ever accomplished.
We want to think and make decisions for ourselves..and the old Matrix doesn't like it.

However, we all may just end up becoming cyber-cogs in some huge global melting pot of presumed universal ideals.

Fellow Canuck Marshall McLuhan coined the term Global Village back in the 60's.

"McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence":
when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture.

In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village.

The idea that technology has no per se moral bent -- it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realizationMcLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study –-
popularly quoted as "the medium is the message."

Ok let's look at his tetrad theory about how each medium inter-reacts.

Wiki uses the Radio example.
Radio was supposedly going to kill newspapers.

Radio is a sound medium that amplified the importance of voice and music. Radio relied on limiting the importance of print and visuals.

The next logical step was a morphing of the two into Television...which in turn gave birth to the Personal Computer which puts every person in charge of operating their own Radio/Tv/Newspaper or Magazine that offers both audio and visual aspects...
and all with a level of immediacy and intimacy that none of the other mediums can compete with.

Advertisers are jumping off those old Media like rats on a sinking ship. Conglomporations and Advertisers already know this and they are desperately trying to control the Internet. They want to be back in the driver's seat.

The Conglomporations want to control and pillage the global village.

The Internetted Computer is why we are seeing the BIG Newspapers start to falter, CD sales dwindle, Broadcast Tv fading, the Book market is next.
Video killed the Radio Star but the PC will kill them all...to some extent yet to be determined.

Where does that leave us?

McLuhan's collective global village is still in it's infancy and it is choking on cliches and archetypes.

We can still lump Blogs into categories but I've noticed that most of you can express yourselves in multiple ways.

We don't need to box ourselves in but we do because we've been trained to think that way.

Now we can interact with individuals anywhere in the world anytime.
We are the ME in MEdium.
Welcome to the WEDIUM Neo.
WE are the message and the messengers.

Like it or not it is on! Right now cyberstars are recreating the successful aspects of the previous mediums but as we figure out how to do more out here, this too will change. Imagine a world with 6 Billion Stations?

Have you noticed that the number of Celebrities seems to be growing exponentially out here? There was a finite number of Movie Stars when I was a kid back in the 60s..now I couldn't possibly name or keep track of all of them.

We finally realised that there are millions of incredibly talented people out here...not just a handful like our previous generations were led to believe. Millions.

There is more information out here than we can handle...too many Blogs, too many Twitterers..remember we can only handle about 150 relationships.

So the rest of all this crap out here is going to gel and morph and become some sort of collective conscience. Big Brother meets the Matrix at the cyber water cooler. Physical borders will blur and our global village will become a part of our reality...as real as the real world.


Now do you want the Red Pill and see how deep Carroll's Alicinian rabbit-hole goes?

Or the Blue Pill:
the story ends, you wake up, and you believe whatever you want to believe.