It’s Sunday, and when I sat down to write, I was ready to declare it my odds and ends blog day. In Ye Olde Presse Daze (when I was getting paid to columnize the known world), the common practice was to save this type of tome for a time when you really had nothing deep to write about…or just felt like having a slack day.
Now, I expected to be accused of that by those cynics amongst you. However, I would enjoy pointing out that when I did odds and ends a week ago, I was the recipient of several messages from various non-Maritime locales that thanked me for keeping wandering or relocated souls plugged in to home thoughts. It was nice to be far away but not unplugged, several said.
I had just written the following lines:
It was a really interesting week for reader responses. Exotic locations reporting in included Korea, Calgary, Viet Nam, Washington DC, Victoria, Missouri, Sherbrooke PQ, Vancouver, Japan, Ottawa, and Timberlea.
That’s when it hit me. You know, that blinding flash of light that tells you there is something larger going on here after all. This wasn’t an item. It wasn’t really even a column. It was a 45 year old prophesy fulfillment and I had missed it. The cock had crowed and I hadn’t even heard it!
You see, a few years back (quite a few years, in all honesty!), this guy named Marshall McLuhan pontificated on the state of mass media in his day and the future. There would be a shrinking through a communications revolution, and a smaller, more intense information planet would result, he said. Actually, he didn’t call it a planet at all. He termed it “the global village”.
To make it worse, I realized I’d already been given major omens that McLuhan's prophecy was coming true.
On Oct. 19, 2005, Chloe Ernest wrote in The Kings Journalism Review about what we were doing in my Applied Broadcast Journalism class. She found that without teaching McLuhan, ABJ was fulfilling him. She went to McLuhan’s biographer for justification, described ABJ for him, and found her thoughts justified:
“Even though this class (ABJ) doesn't study McLuhan, it puts an important McLuhan principle into action, says McLuhan biographer Terry Gordon, a professor at Dalhousie University. "It sounds like a promising approach," Gordon says. "My intuition says [McLuhan] would probably say that's good - maximum involvement. That was a big principle for him, maximum involvement."
OK! I, a child of the 60s, should have picked up on that. Omen! Foreshadowing! A major hint about something that I should have recognized!
If McLuhan had been looking over my shoulder last week, he would have been smiling with amusement. I wrote in my snug little lakeside home office in Waverley, Nova Scotia. Then I pressed one button and in that everyday everywhere act, opened a door to his global village. And the villagers responded! And I kept plodding along, gazing at my feet, and missed, until now, the bigger picture.
I’m not all that young and spry anymore. I do try to keep my oar in the water and rock the boat when I remember how (although Christine Emberley may have been a tad overly-enthusiastic when she recently wrote : “Way to go, Ray! 60+ and still rocking the establishment!”) New ideas sometimes take a while to get through to me.
However, McLuhan was new in the 60s and, I confess, although I always nodded knowingly in my pseudo-intellectual way when he was mentioned, it wasn’t until I sat down to write this that a truly blinding epiphany finally got through to me. Actually, some had probably been there before but I likely disregarded them as early retina damage. But this guy was right and I, along with everyone reading this right now, are not only the proof but the product!
Oh great dishonorable intellectual failure! We worshiped at his altar when we were young, then relegated him to a shelf with all the other old thinkers to become just another potential topic for a university paper! Meanwhile, year after year went by, mass communications evolved, and we slowly crept into McLuhanland without even recognizing it!
Just how dense am I? Try these quotes from yesterday’s Chronicle-Herald about journalism for tomorrow and beyond:
“The future is a mixed medium of picture, sound, and print, all packaged in small, easily consumable stories”
“We are no longer just talking about how this generation communicates, but what they communicate.”
Today, young people and an increasing number of adults go online for their news, all at the touch of a button.
Today, you can plant a rumour on the Internet and, in an hour, it’s validated news around the world.
We have to break down the concept of each separate medium. They’re going to flow together.
The horror! The horror!
I said all those things in Peter Duffy’s Saturday column. Me. Phony old me! Validating the Second Coming of McLuhan! Sounding like a prophet and not even realizing it!
He was right! The Internet isn’t a communications medium, it is the message! We who use it are the product!
They say that somewhere in Africa there is a special, quiet place where elephants past their time go to die in peace. I assume there is a similar spot for the last of us dinosaurs. I hear it calling.
Anybody know the way?
(30)
Now, I expected to be accused of that by those cynics amongst you. However, I would enjoy pointing out that when I did odds and ends a week ago, I was the recipient of several messages from various non-Maritime locales that thanked me for keeping wandering or relocated souls plugged in to home thoughts. It was nice to be far away but not unplugged, several said.
I had just written the following lines:
It was a really interesting week for reader responses. Exotic locations reporting in included Korea, Calgary, Viet Nam, Washington DC, Victoria, Missouri, Sherbrooke PQ, Vancouver, Japan, Ottawa, and Timberlea.
That’s when it hit me. You know, that blinding flash of light that tells you there is something larger going on here after all. This wasn’t an item. It wasn’t really even a column. It was a 45 year old prophesy fulfillment and I had missed it. The cock had crowed and I hadn’t even heard it!
You see, a few years back (quite a few years, in all honesty!), this guy named Marshall McLuhan pontificated on the state of mass media in his day and the future. There would be a shrinking through a communications revolution, and a smaller, more intense information planet would result, he said. Actually, he didn’t call it a planet at all. He termed it “the global village”.
To make it worse, I realized I’d already been given major omens that McLuhan's prophecy was coming true.
On Oct. 19, 2005, Chloe Ernest wrote in The Kings Journalism Review about what we were doing in my Applied Broadcast Journalism class. She found that without teaching McLuhan, ABJ was fulfilling him. She went to McLuhan’s biographer for justification, described ABJ for him, and found her thoughts justified:
“Even though this class (ABJ) doesn't study McLuhan, it puts an important McLuhan principle into action, says McLuhan biographer Terry Gordon, a professor at Dalhousie University. "It sounds like a promising approach," Gordon says. "My intuition says [McLuhan] would probably say that's good - maximum involvement. That was a big principle for him, maximum involvement."
OK! I, a child of the 60s, should have picked up on that. Omen! Foreshadowing! A major hint about something that I should have recognized!
If McLuhan had been looking over my shoulder last week, he would have been smiling with amusement. I wrote in my snug little lakeside home office in Waverley, Nova Scotia. Then I pressed one button and in that everyday everywhere act, opened a door to his global village. And the villagers responded! And I kept plodding along, gazing at my feet, and missed, until now, the bigger picture.
I’m not all that young and spry anymore. I do try to keep my oar in the water and rock the boat when I remember how (although Christine Emberley may have been a tad overly-enthusiastic when she recently wrote : “Way to go, Ray! 60+ and still rocking the establishment!”) New ideas sometimes take a while to get through to me.
However, McLuhan was new in the 60s and, I confess, although I always nodded knowingly in my pseudo-intellectual way when he was mentioned, it wasn’t until I sat down to write this that a truly blinding epiphany finally got through to me. Actually, some had probably been there before but I likely disregarded them as early retina damage. But this guy was right and I, along with everyone reading this right now, are not only the proof but the product!
Oh great dishonorable intellectual failure! We worshiped at his altar when we were young, then relegated him to a shelf with all the other old thinkers to become just another potential topic for a university paper! Meanwhile, year after year went by, mass communications evolved, and we slowly crept into McLuhanland without even recognizing it!
Just how dense am I? Try these quotes from yesterday’s Chronicle-Herald about journalism for tomorrow and beyond:
“The future is a mixed medium of picture, sound, and print, all packaged in small, easily consumable stories”
“We are no longer just talking about how this generation communicates, but what they communicate.”
Today, young people and an increasing number of adults go online for their news, all at the touch of a button.
Today, you can plant a rumour on the Internet and, in an hour, it’s validated news around the world.
We have to break down the concept of each separate medium. They’re going to flow together.
The horror! The horror!
I said all those things in Peter Duffy’s Saturday column. Me. Phony old me! Validating the Second Coming of McLuhan! Sounding like a prophet and not even realizing it!
He was right! The Internet isn’t a communications medium, it is the message! We who use it are the product!
They say that somewhere in Africa there is a special, quiet place where elephants past their time go to die in peace. I assume there is a similar spot for the last of us dinosaurs. I hear it calling.
Anybody know the way?
(30)