Back to McLuhan

Peter Drucker once wrote about his first meeting with Marshall McLuhan that McLuhan said:

"Did I hear you right," asked one of the professors in the audience, "that you think that printing influenced the courses that the university taught and the role of university all together." "No sir," said McLuhan, "it did not influence; printing determined both, indeed printing determined what henceforth was going to be considered knowledge."

In my MIT course in Multimedia Communications in 1989 I said:

"Thus this led to McLuhan's famous phrase that the medium is the message. Specifically, as we developed a new medium for human communications, we dramatically altered the nature of the information that was transferred and the way in which the human perceived what was "truth" and what was not."

As I start to use Google more and more, then one may ask if this, namely what I call Google world, is itself a new medium and thus becomes the defining vehicle for the new message. Is there a redefining of truth. Wikipedia is an example, since anyone can change anything and consensus with some unseen oracle thus defines truth.

I went on and said:

"The important observation that McLuhan makes is not often understood. He really means that the medium defines what is knowledge. A new medium, as a general construct, will define a new knowledge base. We all too often define knowledge so obtained with truth. In fact, truth is that relative reality that we find comfortable to our understanding, and all to often ascribe an absolute character to it. The essence of this paper will deal with these two issues; knowledge as defined in the McLuhanesque sense, and truth as a phenomenological expression of that knowledge. Multimedia communications will alter those definitions and will dramatically change the way we see, think, and ultimately act."

Seeing where the debate is today regarding the Budget and all that is in the political landscape, what I wrote twenty years ago is chilling.