Our medium getting cooler, mate

It’s been a while since we get to talk about Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important thinkers of the time who coined ‘medium is the message’. Talking about his theories actually reminded me of some good times of sharing ideas and ideals back then in my good-old teens… I guess time flies, and the passion about the medium dies, literally and naturally. In today’s seminar we were revisiting McLuhan, not just about the medium is the message, but also about the ‘temperature’ of the message.

Pardon my lazy and not-so-academically-precise paraphasing – medium gets hotter if they deliver information on an one-way street, such as books. Authors decide the narratives and the rythm of wich the stories are being told. On contrary, medium gets colder if users are given more discretions in responding to it, such as the Internet, which can be quite user-oriented if you think about it.

Incidentally my movie-guru mate, Ed, had kindly reminded on tonight’s BBC program, ‘Imagine’.

It explores the potential of the Internet and interviews some of the main key figures, such as the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales; David Weinberger, the author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined (great overviews of the New Media and its potential). It was nice seeing them as a reminiscent to the Wikimania conference last summer (actually Weinberger has kindly posted about my presentation ) (I know I know, I’m being, well to some, a geek)… Over all it’s balanced and informative documentary on how the Internet provided opportunities for user-generated content, with prominent examples like youtube and myspace. But – their criticisms or suggested potential threats about the Internet remain a bit over-simplified by viewing the corporations as the monsters. I do hesitate to agree with this traditional dichotomization of commercial-as-being monster versus participatory-as-the-saint argument.

There are, well, various degrees of ‘evilness‘, so as to speak. For example, although Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all agreed to bend their corporate practices in China, they did it substially differently. While Yahoo had been accused of leading to the imprisonment of the Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, by giving out his personal information, Google vowed to do no evil – and so far – apart from imposing censorship, Google has not given out personal information of its users. In Zuckerman‘s words,

In launching Google.cn, Google made an interesting decision – they did not launch versions of Gmail or Blogger, both services where users create content. This helps Google escape situations like the one Yahoo faced when the Chinese government asked for information on Shi Tao, or when MSN pulled Michael Anti’s blog. This suggests to me that Google’s willing to sacrifice revenue and market share in exchange for minimizing situations where they’re asked to put Chinese users at risk of arrest or detention.

Obviously I also understand that for an one-hour program, they have done what possible to fill in the information matrix. What I like in particular, is that I get to see the author of the 1 millionth article on Wikipedia as well as Clay Shirky in ‘real’ for the first time. And may I say – he’s actually quite charming. (Yes I like reading his blogs on many-2-many).

Finally – hm everyone is talking about second life now.. I downloaded it months ago and never have time to play with it. A quick yardstick would be there are already 17,723 photos on flickr. For those who are interested in knowing what it is but dont’ bother to start one for yourself, flickr is a good way to start your exploration. The only question I have is the copyright policy of the secondlife – how far can I play around with the screen captures? One prof was kind enough to share a moment of having a meeting with grad students on second life,

For more information, please visit their wiki.