I was reading Nicholas Carr’s review of Douglas Coupland’s latest book: Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!
“He heralded the global village, and was genuinely excited by its imminence, but he also saw its arrival as the death knell for the literary culture that he revered. The electronically connected society would be the setting not for the further flourishing of civilization but for the return of tribalism. The intellectual detachment that characterizes the solitary thinker—and that was the hallmark of McLuhan’s own work—would be replaced by the communal excitements of what we have today come to call “interactivity.”” – Nicholas Carr, The Medium is McLuhan
Then I stumbled across the farewell email from the departing President for AOL Media and Studios that was posted by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch earlier this week. It was interesting to contrast the theory, or should I say the vision, created by one of mass media’s leading thinkers during the 1960′s with the harsh reality of life as a one of new media’s “Dashboard Men”.
Did Marshall McLuhan ever dream of a new medium, or for that matter even imagine a message, shaped by the purist application of core metrics? A world of Content at Scale? A world of Roadmaps, Sprints and Dashes and Swarm Reviews? A world of improving engagement, higher UV’s and Organic Growth? I wonder?
I must admit that up until very recently I thought the future of the Internet would be won not by the creators of content but those that allowed us to navigate the content.
My dream was, and still is, to have access to a web navigator that allows me to traverse the web in much the same way a sail boat can traverse the sea or a plane can fly through the air. A transporter without limitation. A browser not restricted by the inherent limitations of hyper links. A veritable TARDIS of the net. Capable of surfing through, across and in and out of the chaos in real time.
For me, if the medium was the message, then it was about traversing the connections that bind the web.
Today I’m starting think I was fundamentally wrong to think that the journey between the connections was at the heart of understanding the medium.
I have discovered that in a medium where meaning is irrelevant then the journey in search of meaning is also fundamentally irrelevant.
This I think is the great puzzle and, in many ways, the great sadness of our age. In a world of abundant media we have ultimately created a medium rich in everything but what really matters… meaning.
For most of us it isn’t about the journey at all. It is simply about creating our little bit of order in the chaos. Be that through the activity of generating endless lists or the building of private and public Digital Nests.
We may search but we do not travel far before we go back to build new lists to search.
The commercial opportunities then were never about profiting from the journey, nor erecting the sign posts or creating destinations, but simply about creating the software tools that allowed individuals to create some semblance of personalised order from the chaos.
But the unfortunate paradox is the more we try to impose meaning on the chaos – either by adding to it or by attempting to place some semblance of order upon it - the more chaotic the medium becomes.
It would appear that a Faustian bargain that has been struck because it is now apparent that the price to be paid for unlimited knowledge is the loss of meaning.
This then I suspect may well be the fate of dashboard man. To accumulate, curate and measure endlessly – be that likes, friends, links, tweets, traffic, hits, perhaps even sales – but fated never to discover meaning in what they do. For them the hollow existence whereby they know the price of everything but sadly, upon reflection, the value of nothing.
In the end failing to realise that it isn’t the subject of our gaze, but the light that falls upon it, that shapes the way we see our world.
Posted on February 28, 2011
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