Beyond McLuhan -- many parallel media, and discussion, no message

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

The following article is based on chat sessions held in June and July  2001 (see www.samizdat.com/chat.html).

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In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan said "the medium is the message." Well, in the world according to John Hibbs, the medium is not the message, should not be the message; in fact, there should not be a message (in the sense of prepackaged content to be delivered to passive consumers). Rather, you focus on the preliminary content and the audience, and the medium is just a means to the end, which is the global discussion that results from allowing large numbers of people around the world to receive preliminary content, react to it, and react to one another.

In other words, rather than picking a single medium (such as, Web, text chat, voice over IP, telephone, radio, etc.) and designing for it, you plan to use as many media as possible, to make it easy for the maximum number of people to connect and participate. Some of these media may be integrated to some extent, but the objective is not to build some massive well-engineered mega-medium, but rather to use whatever is available in parallel -- taking advantage of low-cost and free mechanisms for connecting thousands, even millions of people -- many of whom would be shut out if you limited yourself to just one, or even to just several of these media.

The project at hand is Global Learn Day V, scheduled for Oct. 7, 2001. People around the world involved in distance education will share their progress and the challenges they face -- with the virtual podium starting in New Zealand and moving ahead one time zone per hour for 24 hours. The whole event will be available for hearing/viewing by multiple means (including telephone, streaming audio, Paltalk voice chat, text chat, and broadcast radio). Archives will be available on the Web to check out and react to later. And simultaneous with the "main event", many side conversations will take place on related topics through those same multiple media.

I'm fascinated not so much by the event itself (which is certainly amazing), as by the potential of this approach for promoting global discussion on a regular basis -- setting up a sort of ad hoc multi-media network -- in the true sense of multi-media: not meaning just voice and video, but rather meaning many different means of communication. Such a network could be used to hold regular, scheduled educational and social/entertainment events.  This is a way to build global communities, rube goldberg style -- taking advantage of free and low-cost media to facilitate discussion and move us beyond the corporate-dominated world that McLuhan took for granted.


For details on Global Learn Day, check the Benjamin Franklin Institute, www.bfranklin.edu,  or contact John Hibbs, hibbs@bfranklin.edu
Please send your comments and related suggestions to seltzer@samizdat.com
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