Understanding Media: Chapter 5 Hybrid Energy

Page 49
In reference to new technologies and media, McLuhan writes "They fact that they do interact and span new progeny has been a source of wonder over the ages. It need baffle us no longer if we trouble to scrutinize their action.  We can, if we choose, think things out before we put them out."

But starting on page 246 of Here Comes Everybody, Shirky argues that products can be put out more quickly with social media advising the producers, and open source models reducing the economic penalties for putting out a bad product.  "Open source doesn't reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost of failure; it essentially gets failure for free.  This reversal, where the cost of deciding what to try is higher than the cost of actually trying them, is true of open systems in general."  At the begining of the chapter, Shirky writes "The logic of publish-then-filter means that new social systems have to tolerate enormous amounts of failure.  The only way to uncover and promote the rare success, is to rely, once again, on social structure supported by social tools."

Or, as longtime techie and salesman Guy Kawaski writes in Reality Check: "Don't worry about shipping an innovative product with elements of crappiness...  If a company waits until everything is perfect, it will never ship, and the market will pass it by."

Shirky and McLuhan's ideas seem to be in conflict.  Shirky argues that based on economics, new technology can be pushed out more quickly, because of the ease and prevalence of social media feedback and the lack of economic pain if a product fails because only volunteer time was invested in making the product.  McLuhan might find fault with this approach, because if the new medium is going out the door more quickly, then there is probably no time to fully think out its implications for society, or how best it could be used.  Shirky's answer might be that the increased speed of social media allows for people to consider the impact of their products as they are being released.  Shirky might even argue that this could be one of the changes resulting from a break boundary, which McLuhan mentions in the previous chapter:  The speed of interaction afforded by social media might allow us to more easily and quickly identify, analyze and (hopefully) respond to changes in society.  These changes are themselves being sped up by the fluidity of thought provided by the Internet and its progeny.  McLuhan might argue that it remains to be seen if intelligent thought can be carried out so quickly.  Although there is no economic penalty for volunteers working together to quickly put out a bad piece of software, there can be a major penalty, if society is too quick to jump on the bandwagon of a bad idea hashed out too quickly in social media.

Page 51
"The present book, in seeking to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase in human autonomy."

Does social media increase individual autonomy or decrease it?  It increases autonomy by allowing everyone to become a publisher, and by allowing individuals to communicate with each other, potentially to challenge a dictatorship, as described in Belarus in Here Comes Everbody.  Social media also allows users to express their personalities online, via everything from plain old homepages to a Youtube account.

But social media could decreases autonomy because it can be used by organizations, like a dictatorship trying better coordinate its efforts to put down a rebellion.  And much of the information that people put online to differentiate themselves, can also be used by marketers, governments, or whoever else is able to purchase or collect that data, to identify individuals, their politics, proclivities, and personalities.

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"...Each stick of chewing gum we reach for is acutely noted by some computer that translates our least gesture into a new probability curve or some parameter of social science.  Our private and corporate lives have become information processes just because we have put our central nervous systems outside us in electric technology."

McLuhan could have written this in the last few years, referring to privacy concerns online.