Saturday, February 17, 2007
This is an update to a post I wrote last year called “Corporate Media Gets the Game.” Long story short, Chevy embraced Web 2.0 and came out with a web site that allowed everyday folks to create their own Chevy ads. Of course, some people used that as an opportunity to criticize the company. And while many expected Chevy to realize its mistake and take the whole thing down, they didn’t. Instead, they realized that when you operate in new media the conversation goes both ways. The firm gets to advertise to consumers, and consumers get to advertise about the firm. But then I did a Marshall McLuhan take on the whole thing, especially the criticism, and I realized, even though the critical ads are trying to take Chevy down, Chevy’s trucks are still impossibly driving to the tops of mountains, aren’t they?–proving once again, to the critics’ chagrin I’m sure, that the medium is the message (McLuhan 1994).
Thursday, April 27, 2006
I suppose that it’s because I have finals that I can’t stop finding excuses to blog, but a whole slew of thoughts just occurred to me while discussing the above quote with my Dad. I can’t help but jot them down. I picked up on that meme from an old roommate of mine, Aristide Sechandice. It was a long time ago, but I think he told me that it was Francois Rabelais who said it. The main point that set off a lot of other ideas during the conversation with my Dad was the history of property up to the current debate on intellectual property and why that phrase is an oxymoron.
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Thursday, September 8, 2005
It’s all clear to me now… Such statements tend to be followed by a real gem of insight or total insanity. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you which is to be the case regarding what follows. What I believe I have done is construct a relevant and interesting thesis for a book that I am writing concerning the human mind, memes and the media. It makes sense to me anyway.
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Monday, April 4, 2005
A common debate is raging across the web. It is a debate about credentials and who is allowed to provide and distribute information. Should bloggers be considered journalists? Is wikipedia a trustworthy source of information? For that matter it is a question of who should tell us about our wars, the Pentagon or our soldiers? This debate is also about who can provide what services. Can a loosely-knit group of programmers provide software of equal quality to large corporations? And can independent artists and filmmakers and musicians gain the popularity of the mainstream entertainment? This is largely a debate about expertise and it won’t likely be settled by a debate at all but by the rules of an emerging medium.
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Monday, March 7, 2005
Television on mobile phones is just starting to happen. It begs the question, what would Macluhan have thought? In Understanding Media [amazon link] he discusses cool and hot media. But in McLuhan’s world of 1964, media were tied to machines. How then could a cell phone (the cool medium of the telephone) that runs TV (a hot medium) be described? My answer: it can’t. The dawn of electric media actually points to the death of the machine in its literal form.
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