I followed the link from our resident curator of all things McLuhan @alexkuskis to discover a tightly written thought piece on The English Language, Marshall McLuhan, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

It starts well exploring the impact of entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) on the English Language, moves elegantly into post-modern ideas about how meaning is shaped by the audience, and then closes with an unfortunate reference to how McLuhan's idea about "The Medium is the Message" has (d)evolved into "The Recipient is the Message".

It was sadly a step to far. Things would have been far more interesting if the discussion had moved from McLuhan to explore the idea of "the network is the message", preferably via Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning, and how entropy, via the network effect, has fundamentally changed both the author and the audience's relationship with meaning (i.e. Meaning is irrelevant. I'm on the look out for experiences).

Thankfully Alex stepped into the discussion with this clarification on what McLuhan was trying to say in relation to the Medium and the Message.

"This often repeated phrase by McLuhan (“the medium is the message”) is his most misunderstood idea; it does NOT mean what it literally says and you have to understand it in the context in which McLuhan wrote it.

It means that we should pay more attention to the impact on the world that a medium has, consider how it changes society and the world both for better and worse, rather than its content, “the new scale that is introduced into our affairs”, rather than the messages that are carried."

Now let's see if we can clarify just as succinctly the final step of how in a network of databases meaning has been replaced by experiences.

In information theory meaning is irrelevant or more accurately meaning is separated from information so that it can be stored in a database and transmitted over the network.

If the network is now the database (i.e. Internet) then it is self evident that on the Internet meaning is irrelevant.

What matters is how we discover the information and we in our own way (re)use this information. On the Internet meaning is experienced (i.e. through our actions).

Authors don't construct messages they construct experiences.

These experiences are best understood as units of engagement rather than units

of knowledge. The most successful of these Authors have created what could best be described as List Engines that create personalised "Bucket Lists of Momentary Experiences" for each member of the audience.

Add all this together and we discover the Internet has fundamentally changed our ideas about meaning. Before the Internet the search for meaning was something of a life long road trip. You harvested what you gathered on the journey.

Today we experience (and in turn express) meaning in fleeting, apparently random and disconnected moments.

So where as the entropy equation in the original article read Room plus Child plus Time equals Mess. The new media equation now reads Message plus Audience plus Time equals Mess. Why? Simply because the message become disassembled and reconstructed into a new experience each time it shared across the network.

Till next time...

Copyright 2012 Digital Partners Pty Limited. All Rights Reserved.