mmnotes

This analysis has been done a few years ago but it’s still relevant: it lays down basic, simple observations that a lot of media are still battling against rather than using them to their advantage:

• we have to find ways of using the influx of readers’ messages
• we have to find ways of hosting exchanges between readers
• we are in a constant flux of losing and gaining readers, so we have to set up constant features for avoiding to lose them and for keeping the ones we gain.

The people named in the list have common characteristics: they post content regularly on the Web (but not too much); they do journalism, whether they are journalists and/or have other crafts; they are better than good; they are creators; they are driven; they are fun to read.

Please read What does “beta” mean? here and help me edit the post.

“…professor of English literature and literary critic” from Wikipedia

I must say that I have not half of McLuhan prodigious cultural knowledge and I don’t get a significant part of his literary references. So I am not venturing on this terrain. Furthermore, McLuhan was mainly a man of the spoken word rather than a writer and there is beauty beyond literal meaning in the shock of his words.

I also can understand how it feels to swim in a giant flow of information and to be swept in swirls of echoing data: it is not always easy to transcribe the sparks of rising correspondences or the trail of fleeting harmonies. Every time I am tempted to write as a macluhaniac, I just have to read one or two of his pages to remember that I am a simpler member of the tl;dr club and I go back to diagram drawing. :-)

I think that, given sufficiently advanced computing, culture as a whole could be holographic: we could probably deduce chemistry from movies, music from physics or religions from gastronomy. So one can as well deduce media from literature or, as I am trying to do, from news and marketing (which is not necessarily the best angle, but it’s all I have).