Marshall McLuhan “Probes”

Again and again and again I find “probes” from Marshall McLuhan mesmerizingly prescient.

Again and again and agin, Marshall anticipated, prescribed even, the Internet, the Web and Social Media some 50 years ago. Imagine being 50 years ahead of your time.

Moreover, he did so from a modernist frame; you didn’t need a postmodernist prerequisite to understand him. Striding between or straddling the dialectical divide is a stunning feat in itself; he even dumbed down “the medium is the message” to “the medium is the massage” in the ’70s as a capitulation to the less deft. But he’s fundamentally a modernist, a constructionist.  His intent, a clarion call to electric media awareness. His method, traditionally didactic. Let us begin.

“Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.  When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.”

If you’re reading this blog, the point is aptly demonstrated.

“The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of nature. Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology. Each new technology is a reprogramming of social life.”

Social networking is most comprehensively understood within this model. All cultural forms —  even a poke between friends — are digitized, transformed and transacted as new social currencies.

Speaking of his own era:

“We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It live mythically and in depth. The mosaic form demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being…”

Coincidentally, the name of the Web browser to popularize the Web: Mosaic.

“The age of writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. The new media are not bridges between man and nature — they are nature.”

I’ll leave it at that for the moment.  More to come if I continue to have more time.

More on Marshall McLuhan…

Chrome vs Chromeless

Google’s Chrome browser is a solution that won’t work for a problem that doesn’t exist.

One can argue that the primary success metrics of a browser are performance, stability and user experience and be right.  However Google Chrome is only incrementally to negligibly faster, more stable and cognitive load lighter than the competition/substitution. Moreover, if the Google Chrome team had worked with an existing browser development team, say Mozilla, much time, cost and user switching would have been spared and perhaps poured into actual disruptive innovation. (Aaron Boodman’s got a list if you need it.)

But that’s the least of the factors as to why Chrome is a curiously deliberate failure for Google.

Undoubtedly, rhe next disruptive innovation in browsers, and probably all user-agents of the Open Web, is to be consumed by Web itself.

Let’s imagine an app called Chromeless. Much like Fluid or Prism, Chromeless is nothing more than a rectangle surface to render Web content. However Chromeless’s default URL loads the chrome of Chrome into the rectangle. Chrome’s chrome is loaded in Chromeless from a trusted URL thus has higher security access and runs in a protected mode. Web pages loaded into Chromeless’s Chrome chrome cannot access the protected chrome. Voila — Chromeless now has all the features of Chrome and all the benefits of SaaS.

And no company has more to gain from the Web consuming its browser than the undisputed software-as-a-service (SaaS) heavy weight champion Google.

But wait, there’s more. Chromeless implements a model whereby any Web app is not just a stand-alone Web app, but is the user-agent of any arbitrary Open Web client-server system.  Chromeless empowers not just SaaS, but Open Web client-server innovation at Web speed, diversity and agility. Chromeless is a disruptive innovation from the viewpoint of technology (described above), product (e.g., arbitrary user-agents) and business (client-server innovation, like the Web itself, compels standards/openness thus accelerates industry-specific value-chain development).

But alas Chrome is not Chromeless. Why bother having a Ferrari if you drive looking at the rear-view mirror?

Kraftwerk Documentary

The full video is on Veoh. Recommended. It’s almost three hours long, yet mostly interesting even for the  moderate krauthead.  Kraftwerk’s inestimable influence on music culture is thoroughly considered and chronicled.

That alone would be engaging, but then there’s time spent delving into Eno and Bowie in Berlin recording Low in the mid-70s, heavily influenced by krautatic  innovation. According to the documentary, there may have been a Bowie + Kraftwerk album if not for “scheduling problems” on Kraftwerk’s side. If it existed, it would likely trump Low as my favorite album ever.