Various wise words from Marshall McLuhan

Any technology tends to create a new human environment… Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike.

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

American bureaucracy ... was set up for very slow speeds of the printed word and railways. At electric speeds, nothing in the USA makes sense.

… as we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self and what remains of community will disappear.

And finally

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

and as the benevolent magic elves of the Wikipedia put it:

Note again McLuhan’s stress on the importance of awareness of a medium’s cognitive effects. He argues that, if we are not vigilant to the effects of media’s impact, the global village has the potential to become a place where totalitarianism and terror rule.

Published by William Heath on 24/09/06 at 8:18pm

Comments

I’m livid at the suggestion that the government, any government of a democracy, should become so self-contained that it ignores any ideas for improvements. It might be different if all their current policies, methods and systems were effective and economic: Media reports say not!

Surely democracy is more than government announcing what it will do, then demanding that I pay for it?

Reply by Richard S on 09/24/06 at 10:12 pm
Yesterday, I was chatting to a senior manager from one of the government’s largest suppliers of IT services. I asked how they were working with Web 2.0: He’d never heard the term and asked what it meant?

He’d used Google maps, but only for travel directions; occasionally, they use web-conferencing; mostly, they still just work and fly as normal.

Reply by Richard S on 09/24/06 at 10:16 pm
Dear Richard...It is not the aim of this blog to raise you blood pressure on a Sunday night What triggers the ref.to a gov ignoring ideas for improvement?

With the Web 2.0 stuff it’s not an unambiguous term I suppose (and (c) O’Reilly of course). But the plain fact is this stuff is happening too fast to keep up with it and too fast to work out the implications of it. Meanwhile your senior manager has to hit sales targets via procurements that take 18 months or so!

Reply by on 09/24/06 at 10:25 pm
I did not want to clutter the flow of comments on “Co-creation” (a term I don’t yet fully understand): Peter R’s post was well put, but why would (or does) a democratic government react like that? How does it become insulated from the normal outside pressures that affect commercial organizations? Is the problem with “us” or with “them”?

---

Regarding the Senior manager, AFAIK he’s not currently doing work for government, but is certainly responsible for policy and forward planning. At his level, he’s responsible for a number of projects, each at different stages.

As I have found in the past with some Senior Civil servants, and those recently retired but still consulting to government on IT, many lack any personal experience of using the government IT systems either as a “worker” or as a “taxpayer.”

These people set policy, perform “gateway reviews” and manage procurements. They are totally dependent on their advisors. Is that sensible?

Reply by Richard S on 09/24/06 at 11:04 pm
Aha, I see old man McLuhan is getting a work out—Thanks for those “wise” words. I try not getting too attached to his quotables, but one can hardly resist....

I think the central point is that the Internet—and especially those parts of it where most of us “senior” folks rarely go, such as into games and MySpace and Second Life—is indeed creating a different type of personality out there in the demos, and that these are not merely new elites but rather a generation of cyber-literate folks whose attitude toward governance and business is very different from ours—or at least from our views of the ideal. They are indeed “light-hearted” (there was a great piece in the NYT a week ago titled “My Satirical Self” which captures this quite nicely—but sadly it is behind a subscription wall; let me know if you wish the URL) and intelligent, and most importantly, they are still maturing (emerging?) into this intersting population that requires a different approach if “we” are to “reach them”.

Richard S.’s manager friend is, I fear, the very type of person who is is determining the design of e-governance, and that is quite depressing. Perhaps what we need is a more “coolhunting” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolhunting) approach to e-governance, although I don’t think we need take it to an extreme....

Reply by Mel Dubnick on 09/25/06 at 10:16 am
It’s interesting. Something we’ve often pondered over at ARCH is the potential effect on a child’s development of high levels of surveillance and inter-agency information-sharing.

Our thinking goes along these lines: if privacy is the means by which we ‘regulate access to our selves’(Westin, I think?) then it is essential for the creation of the personal boundaries that define us as individuals.

What are the possible effects upon children who grow up without control over their personal information? Will we reach a point where people no longer have a strongly-defined sense of self? What would society then be like?

In addition, if children don’t have a sense of personal boundary, that also has implications for their ability to protect themselves from unwanted intrusion. It doesn’t appear to make sense to tell them they can “say no”, which implies having an idea of themselves as ‘separate’, while treating them in ways that militate against that separation.

It would be fascinating to bring together all the literature from the privacy quarter and from psychology/psychoanalysis. I suspect there’s a PhD in there somewhere!

Reply by Terri on 09/25/06 at 10:58 am

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

Next entry: NSPCC "Be the full stop" maps mashup

Previous entry: Adjusting to Nomads

Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

Comment

Anyone is free to comment. Or mail with an article if you want to be an author. I'll post it up and send you a password. This whole thing is supported by Kable.

Authors

Member List

Sign up for new articles

Various wise words from Marshall McLuhan

Comments

Ideal Government

Categories

Comment

Authors

Sign up for new articles

Copyright

Designed by...

Statistics

Various wise words from Marshall McLuhan

Comments

Ideal Government

Categories

Comment

Sponsor

Authors

Sign up for new articles

Copyright

Designed by...

Statistics