Transcript The Laws Of (New) Media: Marshall McLuhan And Knowledge

The Laws Of (New) Media:
Marshall McLuhan
And Knowledge Technologies
Dale Hunscher, CEO
South Wind Design, Inc.
06 March 2001
Copyright © 2001, South Wind Design, Inc.
Marshall McLuhan
1911-1980
McLuhan was a Canadian academic,
a literary scholar whose studies of the
effects of advertising and of print
media blossomed into a new
discipline of media studies
Far from being an ardent technophile,
his attitude toward technology was
decidedly ambivalent!
McLuhan’s insights into the effects of
media on our culture—and
ourselves!—grow more useful everySlide 2
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What Is A Medium?
According to McLuhan, media are the
extensions of our senses, our bodies,
and our minds
As the caddisfly larva manufactures
its “shell” of stones, the bird its nest,
the spider its web, Homo sapiens
manufactures media to protect
him/herself from the world
There is a price, however—media
also deprive us of direct experience of
the world!
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Slide 3
The Mediation Of
Experience
McLuhan believed that media form the
all-important ground against which all
our perceptions and actions are figure
Because they “mediate” all human
experience, media play a vital role in
determining the conceptual framework
of a society or culture
Only recently have media begun to
change at a rate fast enough to be
detected by those experiencing their
effects!
Slide 4
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Media And The Self
Sensory Inputs
As carriers of information,
media magnify, filter, and
distort inputs to all our
senses
Media
Eye
Ear
Nose
Tongue
Skin
The Self & Its Conceptual Framework
Speech
Gesture
A McLuhanesque
View Of The Self
Locomotion
Media
Media strengthen,
refine, and distort
our outputs
Physical Outputs
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Slide 5
Media And Knowledge
Q: What makes a medium “cool” or
“hot”?
A: Cool =
Low Definition…
Less Information…
More Audience Participation
Hot =
High Definition…
More Information…
Less Audience Participation
Q: So do hot media excel at
knowledge transfer, since they provide
more information?
A: Not necessarily! In fact, not likely!Slide 6
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Media And Knowledge
Consider these media with which most
of us are familiar (with their McLuhan
“heat ratings” in bold):
Lecture:
Hot
Seminar:
Cool
Lab:
Cooler
Life Experience: Coolest
There is appears to be an inverse
relationship between McLuhan’s
concept of heat and the knowledge Slide
we7
seem to gain from a medium!
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Media And Knowledge
Knowledge is not an inherent property of
content—More information does not
automatically translate into more
knowledge!
Knowledge is the extension of your
conceptual framework as the result of
stimuli you receive—stimuli that come from
the message and the medium.
Extension of the conceptual framework
can’t be forced by any amount of
information—you
can’t
know
something Slide 8
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2001
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South Wind
Design, Inc.
you’re not ready to learn!
The Laws Of Media
McLuhan posited four Laws of
Media, framed as questions we can
ask about any medium:
What does it extend?
What does it make obsolete?
What does it retrieve?
What is its reversal potential?
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Slide 9
Extension
What does the artifact enhance or
intensify or make possible or
accelerate? This can be asked
concerning a wastebasket, a painting,
a steamroller, or a zipper, as well as
about a proposition in Euclid or a law
of physics. It can be asked about any
word or phrase in any language.
- Marshall McLuhan and Eric
McLuhan
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Slide 10
The Extended Phenotype
In genetics, an organism’s
phenotype is the outer
manifestation of the tendencies
inherent in the genetic material
The extended phenotype is the
reach of genetic tendencies
beyond the organism into the
external world—e.g., a bird’s
nest, a spider’s web, or the
caddisfly larva’s stone house…
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Slide 11
Media As Man’s Extended
Phenotype
Media act as humanity’s extended
phenotype by extending our sense,
Reify: from the
motor, and mental capacities
Thought and experience Latin res, thing: to
treat an abstract
are evanescent
concept as a
concrete object or
Media allow us to reify
entity.
(and thereby capture)
Evanescence:from
the Latin
them for later
evanescere: the
tendency to vanish
consumption
like vapor.
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Slide 12
Examples Of Extension
Writing extended speech over
space and time
Arithmetic extends our capacity
for measuring and balancing
Libraries extend our capacities
for memory and recollection
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Slide 13
Obsolescence
If some aspect of a situation is
enlarged or enhanced, simultaneously
the old condition or unenhanced
situation is displaced thereby. What is
pushed aside or obsolesced by the
new “organ”?
- Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan
Laws Of Media
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Slide 14
Obsolescence
Media extend the same few senses
and motor capacities over and over
again—there haven’t been any new
ones for a while!
Therefore new media must displace
existing media, extending the
underlying sense or motor organs in
different ways
The older medium doesn’t die,
however…
More typically the older medium willSlide 15
be transformed, continuing to exist
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Examples Of
Obsolescence
As writing had made speech
obsolete, print made writing
obsolete
Double-entry bookkeeping
obsolesced simple arithmetic
Libraries rendered memory
enhancement techniques
(rhetoric, Memory Palaces, etc.)
obsolete
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Slide 16
Retrieval
What recurrence or retrieval of earlier
actions and services is brought into
play simultaneously by the new form?
What older, previously obsolesced
ground is brought back and inheres in
the new form?
- Marshall McLuhan and Eric
McLuhan
Laws Of Media
06 March 2001
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Slide 17
Retrieval
Media differ in their structure, focus,
and pacing, but ultimately they draw
from the same wellsprings of
perception and action as earlier
media
Therefore, every new medium
retrieves some characteristics of older
media, incorporating them as content!
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Slide 18
Examples Of Retrieval
Print retrieved tribal universality
of knowledge
Accounting software obsolesced
double-entry bookkeeping,
retrieving personal knowledge of
finance
The World-Wide Web retrieves
the Homeric encyclopaedia—a
tribal store of knowledge
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Slide 19
Reversal
When pushed to the limits of its
potential … the new form will tend to
reverse what had been its original
characteristics. What is the reversal
potential of the new form?
- Marshall McLuhan and Eric
McLuhan
Laws Of Media
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Slide 20
Reversal
Claude Shannon showed that
information exists in the tension
between order and chaos—both total
order and total chaos contain no
information
McLuhan maintained that media
inevitably become overheated as we
adapt to them and imbue them with
too much regularity and order—
Slide 21
resulting in death by enthalpy!
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Reversal
When a medium becomes subject to
too many rules or constraints, the
informative capacity of the medium
decreases, causing it to “overheat”
When enthalpy progresses too far,
reversal is inevitable
The original extension advantage is lost
The resultant discomfort brings the
medium from background to foreground
The medium undergoes transmutation…
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Slide 22
Examples Of Reversal
With its epitomization of orderly
thought, print necessarily reversed
into humor and graffiti
Accounting software becomes overly
complex, reverses into the ultrasimple—e.g., expense organizers
running on handheld computers
As the World-Wide Web overcommercialized and overSlide 23
commoditized content, it began
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Media Foundations Of
Knowledge Technologies
Before we can apply the Laws of
Media to knowledge
technologies, we must expand
our mental model of the self
Since the death of McLuhan in
1980, new media have emerged
that extend ever more refined
capacities of the human organism
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Slide 24
Organic View Updated For
New Media
Sensory Inputs
A Post-McLuhanesque View Of
Media And The Self
Media
Eye
Ear
Nose
Pattern Recognition
Tongue
Skin
Problems
Discrimination & Classification
Solutions
Arithmetic
&
Symbolic
Logic
Model-Building
Inference
Memory
Story Generation & Interpretation
Conceptual Framework / Current Context
Speech
Gesture
The Unconscious
Recollection
Locomotion
Media
Physical Outputs
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Slide 25
SGML And XML
SGML extended our pattern recognition,
discrimination, and classification capacities
by standardizing the syntax of semantic
markup across OS/HW platforms and
human and computer languages
SGML obsolesced proprietary text markup,
retrieving implicit semantic implications that
had been lost to formatting concerns
As SGML became overheated through
over-specification (Groves, HyTime), it
reversed
to become
XML!
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2001
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Wind Design, Inc.
Slide 26
The Role Of XML
XML obsolesces both document
processing and data processing,
retrieving the unity of data and
documents that prevailed before
computers
XML reverses into SML et al.
XML-based vocabularies in turn
extend our model-building
capacity, obsolescing codeembedded information models
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Slide 27
Media View Of XML
Sensory Inputs
A Post-McLuhanesque View Of
Media And The Self
Media
Eye
Ear
Nose
Pattern Recognition
Tongue
Skin
Problems
Discrimination & Classification
Solutions
Arithmetic
&
Symbolic
Logic
Model-Building
Memory
Inference
Story Generation & Interpretation
Conceptual Framework / Current Context
Speech
Gesture
The Unconscious
XML
Extends
These
DomainSpecific XML
Vocabularies
Extend This
Recollection
Locomotion
Media
Physical Outputs
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Slide 28
RDF And XTM
Both RDF and XTM extend our
model-building capacity and provide a
foundation for inference
RDF works from the inside out, XTM
from the outside in
By applying them, we construct
primitive conceptual frameworks
They obsolesce META tagging and
retrieve the flexibility of our innate
semantic abilities
Slide 29
What will they become when they
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The Place Of RDF And
XTM
Sensory Inputs
A Post-McLuhanesque View Of
Media And The Self
Media
Eye
Ear
Nose
Pattern Recognition
Tongue
Skin
Problems
Discrimination & Classification
Solutions
Arithmetic
&
Symbolic
Logic
Model-Building
Story Generation & Interpretation
Conceptual Framework / Current Context
Speech
XML
Vocabularies
Memory
Inference
Gesture
The Unconscious
Recollection
Locomotion
Media
Physical Outputs
06 March 2001
SGML &
XML
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RDF/XTM
(Foundations)
RDF/XTM
Networks
(Substance)
Slide 30
The Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a “machinereadable” successor to the current
World-Wide Web…
…but there are really two facets of
the Semantic Web—a human-centric
facet and a machine-centric facet
From the user’s viewpoint, the
Semantic Web will have two goals:
Do what I mean
Find what Copyright
I mean
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The Domain Of Media
Proxies
The machine-centric facet of the
Semantic Web will be the exclusive
workplace and playground of our
media proxies
Media proxies are more or less
complete extensions of our selves—
software-based androids, if you will—
that operate independently and
autonomously in cyberspace…
Slide 32
…the logical conclusion of a process
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Media Proxies:
Automata As Actors And
Audience
Existing media proxies exhibit very
limited intelligence, performing pattern
recognition, discrimination, and
classification
For example: automata such as bots
and spiders manipulate media on our
behalf—media interacting with other
media as our proxies!
What could they do if they were more
Slide 33
intelligent?
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Media Proxies: Eliminating
The Need For Universal
Standards
Reasonably intelligent media proxies
will come into being primarily to fulfill
their “killer app”:
Intelligent media proxies can
eliminate the need for universal
standards!
Picture a world where automata can
actually communicate with each other,
negotiating meaning dynamically! Slide 34
What would such a world be like?
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Media Proxies:
The Next Step In Machine
Intelligence
Commun Imagine your new home connecting you and your
ity
family with others in the area with similar interests,
Building even working with other intelligent homes to
arrange get-togethers to welcome you into the
community
Energy
Conserv
ation
Imagine a region wherein all energy-using
appliances share knowledge of energy usage
patterns and collectively plan how to work together
to minimize cost and environmental impact
Medical Imagine a world in which the doctor’s office,
Diagnosi hospital, pharmacy, and plan providers inters
operate to minimize costs and risks while
maximizing quality and timeliness of care
Researc
h
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ImagineCopyright
a world
where
your
natural-language
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South Wind
Design,
Inc.
Slide 35
queries are answered cooperatively by a global
Media Proxies:
The Next Step In Machine
Intelligence
How can proxy media be extended
through knowledge technologies to
meet the requirements for truly
intelligent machines?
A medium that extends our entire
selves is a quantum jump from our
current technology
Tools such as DTD/schema
repositories, RDF databases, and
Slide 36
topic map repositories are necessary
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Media Proxies:
The Next Step In Machine
Intelligence
Q: What currently distinguishes
machine intelligence from human
intelligence?
A: Thus far, computer intelligence
lacks two things….
1)A robust conceptual framework (a
vast and extensible store of cultural and
“common sense” knowledge)
2)The contextual tools to initiate, maintain,
and refine complex sequences of action
based on Copyright
high-level
goals
(i.e., stories,
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Design, Inc.
Slide 37
plots, or scripts)
Media Proxies:
The Next Step In Machine
Intelligence
Technologies like RDF and XTM
provide us with languages for
describing semantic networks—useful
standards for sharing ontologies
Efforts like CYC have begun to lay
the semantic foundations for a truly
robust conceptual framework…
…a framework that is complete,
shared, dynamically extensible, and
self-correcting
Slide 38
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Robust Conceptual
Framework
Comple Humans don’t ordinarily “fall off the edge”
te
of their conceptual frameworks—we can fit
emergent events into our view of the
world, adapt, and move on
Shared Humans (at least within particular
cultures) share a wealth of common
“facts” (assumptions) and a set of stories
(scripts, plots) that explain the course of
any given set of events
Dynami Humans can integrate new facts and
cally
stories into their conceptual frameworks
extensi as new information arrives
ble
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Slide 39
SelfHumans can operate in the face of
The Importance Of Context
Currently, media proxies require hot
media—they lack the grasp of context
needed to participate intelligently in
the experience of the media that
surround and protect them
A robust conceptual framework and
the ability to work within a milieu of
stories will provide the needed
context
A media proxy will be able to describe
not only what it is doing, but why—
i.e., the role its actions play in the Slide 40
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Anatomy Of A Media
Proxy
Sensory Inputs
Anatomy Of The Media
Proxy
Media
Network
Thermistors
Motion Sensors
Parsing & Lexical Analysis
Voice Input
Etc.
SGML &
XML
Problems
ALU
Syntactical Analysis
Solutions
Information Modeling
Evaluation of Rules & Heuristics
Collaborative Agents & Analysts
Knowledge Bases, Blackboards, etc.
Network
Robotics
Speech Synthesis
XML
Vocabularies
Conceptual
Search
Store
Mass Storage
Recall
Displays
Etc.
Media
Physical Outputs
06 March 2001
Inference And Story
Management Happen Here
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RDF/XTM
(Foundations)
Semantic
Networks
(Substance)
Slide 41
The Semantic Web
Revisited
Earlier-generation media extended our
senses and our motor capacities
New Media extend our capacities for
pattern recognition, discrimination and
classification, and model-building, as well
as our conceptual frameworks, culminating
(soon) in the human-centric Semantic Web
The machine-centric Semantic Web will
extend our capacities of inference and
story participation—the very capacities that
ultimately define our humanity!—into a
world populated
by media proxies, whose
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Slide 42
daily experience and inner lives will be
The Future Ahead
…When the walls (and our cars, even
our clothing) can talk
…When the machines can think
…When our questions about the
effects of media on ourselves begin to
apply to the media themselves!
Will a day come when our media
proxies find themselves pining for the
“good old days” of proprietary data
formats, closed systems, 8-bit
character sets, and two-digit years?Slide 43
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Further Reading
 Please visit our Web site for a complete
bibliography. It will be posted within 2-3 weeks.
 http://www.swdi.com/media-readings.htm
06 March 2001
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