Who is shaping you?
Recently, I was reading an online forum for broadcast video prodction geeks like myself. One post caught my attention. Someone had begun a conversation thread about the ABC Television Network laying off 20% of it’s workforce. What captured my mind was that most of the conversation seemed to prove the prophetic teachings and writings of Marshal McLuhan. Keep in mind, this forum is frequented by people who make a living in the media industry.
Marshal McLuhan is best known for this adage. “The medium is the message.” One of the premises of his teachings is that technology has the power to profoundly change us, regardless of the content. Yes, our culture seems infatuated with the lower levels of human depravity. It is easier to passively allow someone else to tell us what to think rather then putting forth effort to reason and think about the world we live in. Still, I think it’s more than that.
McLuhan’s prophetic understanding of how TV – among many other things – would change us can be seen in the comments from the forum I mentioned above.
“quality sometimes comes in behind speed and cost”
“People watch screaming. End of story.”
“Television news is show business. And very little more.”
“Increasingly, the things going on in the world at large seems to have little to do with my life.”
“I think it remains extremely important to actually leave the house and interact with human beings face to face on a daily basis for a healthy dose of perspective.”
Today’s visual medium emphasizes “emotion” over reason, and “speed” over context.
Millions of flashing pixels bombarding us every second. Truly at the speed of light. Video transcends time and space boundaries normally in play when we are chatting with friends at the local coffee shop. It cannot in and of itself convey meaning or context or place. The strength of this medium resides in it’s ability to stimulate the right side of the human brain, which is not good at thinking. I think we all agree that sensationalism and splashy fast paced images have become the norm even with genres like the news, where reason and thought are required to make informed and rational decisions. The viewer demands experience over logic, or is it because the medium demands it?
The web offers us access to billions of people’s opinions and experience. Some of them fiction. Some of them nonfiction. And it’s not a coincidence we call it the “web”. It’s a vast network of totally unrelated threads connected at random and once in a while on purpose. In the end, well actually there is no end. The internet seems to keep growing all on it’s own. At times, surfing the internet can be chaotic. Can our minds manage the billions of bits and bytes of information? Is it possible this medium has contributed to the nonlinear way that many of us now live?
I might as well end with McLuhan’s own quote (because he’s a whole lot smarter than me).
“We shape our powerful tools, and then they shape us.”
So, the question is, “Who or what is shaping you?”