The Internet: sofa or stage?: March 03, 1997 issue of New Thinking

March 03, 1997 New Thinking:
The Internet: sofa or stage?

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March 03, 1997

The Internet: sofa or stage?

By Gerry McGovern

On the Internet, the medium is not the message.

We shape our tools so that we can shape our world. Having shaped them they shape us.

Is modern politics a reflection of modern society or modern media? Did we invent the sound byte or did the medium of television dictate its invention? Has society become an audience, watching itself watching itself? Is all the world a stage or a sofa?

On television the medium is quite probably the message, but on the Internet the message has room to be the message.

Let me step back for a moment and define what I think McLuhan meant when he said that the 'medium is the message,' or as he earlier stated, 'the massage'. I believe that the statement refers to a medium such as television's capacity to dictate how a message is put across.

If we agree that television has brought about an era of newsflash politics, where serious, thoughtful debate has been replaced by images of politicians kissing babies and kicking sound bytes, then we could say that with regard to television, the medium is indeed the message.

The keyword in all of this is 'capacity.' It is the television's capacity to deliver rich, fast-moving visual stimuli which has meant that the message has become a rich, fast-moving visual package.

What is the capacity of the Internet? The Internet offers the capacity for people throughout the world to communicate and to access and make available information in a very economic way.

The fast-moving, visual strength of television is the poor bandwidth, low quality computer screen weakness of the Internet. The communicative, information-delivery strength of the Internet is the soap opera, sound byte, lack of deep analysis weakness of television.

(Another thing: the economics of the Internet brings far more people into the communication and information provision loop, making the Internet a stage, while the television is a sofa.)

Practically every day I meet someone who uses the word 'Internet,' but are in fact talking about television or glossy magazines. We will greatly undersell and ultimately underutilize the Internet if we keep expecting it to be the media we know, rather than the medium it is.

As I said in an earlier New Thinking, the Internet is not the message, rather it enables the message. As I've also said, this is the information age, we are knowledge workers, the Internet is a well of information, a knowledge fountain.

The Internet may be forced to grow up to be television, and much will be our loss, because why do we need television twice? The Internet is like a tractor and television is like a truck. They both have four wheels and an engine. However, one works well in a field, the other drives on a road. One cultivates, the other delivers what is cultivated.

The medium is television and the medium is print and each behave almost like parents towards the Internet. We all have expectations for this bright, young child. Let's not force it to grow up to be a mirror image of its adoptive parents. Let's give it room to be its own unique self.

By Gerry McGovern

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Practically every day I meet someone who uses the word 'Internet,' but are in fact talking about television or glossy magazines.