Technology360

Myth, Media and Meta podcast

As I noted in the previous post below, audio files and presentation decks from the 2007 Iowa DTV Symposium have now been posted online.  This includes my own presentation from Oct. 2nd (and intimidating it was to be presenting the same afternoon as John C. Dvorak and Mark Schubin) titled Myth, Media and Meta: Three Information Epochs and What They Mean for Broadcasting.  Here is the agenda description:

Humans have always created information faster than we create humans. And, consequently, humans are in a constant struggle to extract value from the "noise" of too much information in their environment. The title refers to epochs that are characterized by the techniques we've used. "Myth" being story-telling, poetry, music, etc. "Media" dates from Gutenberg and encompasses traditional broadcasting. "Meta" is the digital age, characterized by use of metadata, compression, "pull" distribution, and distribution systems that can learn user preferences. Broadcasters use all these techniques and social systems may enable them to be successful in "many-to-many" distribution in the future.

Links:  MP3, PPT or for Flash version of the deck click here and scroll down in the Content Track to 4:30 on Tuesday.  Also, I've placed both the MP3 and PPT links permanently in the Files section to the left.

For a written version, see these four posts from early June.  Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta; Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.   --Dennis

McLuhan's web

Nicholas Carr writes:

Marshall McLuhan is back. The 1960s icon’s theories about “electric media” have new resonance now that the internet is becoming our all-purpose conduit for news, information and entertainment.  ¶ McLuhan was an obscure Canadian academic until the mid-Sixties, when his best-selling book Understanding Media turned him into a pop-culture phenomenon. His playfully radical ideas and deliberately disjointed prose perfectly reflected the spirit of the times, when the air was filled with revolutionary rhetoric and pot smoke. Tom Wolfe, in a 1965 article, suggested that McLuhan might be ''the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov.''  ¶  McLuhan’s central thesis, encapsulated in the famous phrase “the medium is the message,” was that the technologies through which we take in information—the media, broadly defined—become “extensions” of our bodies, exerting a profound influence over how we think and act. When an important new medium arrives, it can reshape who we are as individuals and as a society. ...

Link:  Rough Type.  Version in the Guardian.  --Dennis

Myth, Media, Meta: Three Information Epochs and What They Mean For Broadcasting

I was happy (though I had to follow two of my tech heroes, John C. Dvorak and Mark Schubin) to give a presentation again this year as part of the Iowa DTV Symposium, a national event held annually in Des Moines and organized by Dan Miller's great staff at Iowa Public Television.  My topic was the title of this post and attempts to use information theory to find a middle ground between legacy media and new media, the former group too often suffering from hubris and the latter often characterized by naïvté.  I made a preliminary series of four posts on this topic back in early June (here's part I and you can get to the other three from it).  My wife the professor and I are writing a book expanding on the topic.  Stay tuned.

I think they'll be posting audio to their web site, but for now, you can look at my PowerPoint deck which I've posted in the Files area on the left of this blog's main page.  Here's the direct link.  --Dennis

Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta (part 2 of 4)

Myth

This is the second of four parts of a talk originally scheduled this week at Reboot 9.0 in Copenhagen.  Links to the others follow this post.

Myth – which I’m using here very broadly – is the most persistent method of lowering entropy, originating from the necessities of passing on information by oral means, and continuing to the present day – even in educated Western societies.  Poetry, song and legend are the building blocks of myth.  Easy to remember, crafted in metaphor, they have served through millennia to transmit culture, religion, history, law, social mores, and pre-scientific explanations of natural phenomena.

I’ll pick an example from Norse mythology.  My maternal grandmother was born on the island in Denmark which is home to the city of Odense.  Its name comes from Norse words meaning “Odin’s sanctuary.”  My surname comes from the family farm in mid-Norway.  It has several ancient stone-pile graves and the name is likely a kenning – “Hár’s acre” – “The High One’s field,” from one of Odin’s many nicknames – for this field of graves.

Odin was effectively the Nordic/Germanic god of information –credited for eloquence, poetry, music, wisdom, magic, prophecy and inventor of the runes – writing.  His myth has it that he pawned one of his eyes in exchange for wisdom.  Each morning, he sent his two ravens, Hugin and Munin – thought and memory, respectively – to fly the world bringing back what they had seen and heard.

One of the poems in the Poetic Edda, preserved in Iceland in the 13^th century from the oral tradition, is Hávamál, The Sayings of Hár where Odin provides advice for wise living.  Examples below from the translation by W. H. Auden and P. B. Taylor:

No. 27
The ignorant booby had best be silent
When he moves among other men,
No one will know what a nit-wit he is
Until he begins to talk;
No one knows less what a nit-wit he is
Than the man who talks too much.

No. 58
Early shall he rise who has designs
On another’s land or life:
His prey escapes the prone wolf,
The sleeper is seldom victorious.

Pretty benign stuff, but myth derives strength by being close to power – the shaman or priest or official or family head.  Even today, otherwise sober people are demanding that myths be substituted for science in the education system of scientifically sophisticated countries.  Tragically, deaths from stoning or decapitation are still happening in other parts of the world when the codes that myths engender are violated.

But myth can also be sublime.  It would be hard to convince me that any form of information provides more “value per bit” to humans than literature, poetry and music.  To me, the music of Johannes Brahms and the novels of Halldór Laxness touch my soul – to use a very unscientific word – like nothing else.  From the latter’s masterpiece, Independent People, these words about the principal character’s step-daughter:

When a man looks at a flowering plant growing slender and helpless up in the wilderness among a hundred thousand stones, and he has found this plant only by chance, then he asks:  Why is it that life is always trying to burst forth?  Should one pull up this plant and use it to clean one's pipe?  No, for this plant also broods over the limitation and the unlimitation of all life, and lives in the love of the good beyond these hundred thousand stones, like you and me; water it with care, but do not uproot it, maybe it is little Ásta Sóllilja.

The essence of his subtle and complex novel is captured in this one paragraph in a way that a similar number of words of, say, business writing, cannot replicate.

Is it our ability to create myth that makes us human?  Myth hasn’t been replaced by media and “meta.”  To the contrary, myth was an early adopter of, and has arguably thrived under, each.

More about this in part three on media (part one was an introduction, part three deals with media, and part four will conclude with what I’m labeling “meta”).  --Dennis

Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta (part 1 of 4)

Introduction

The Reboot 9.0 conference in Copenhagen that ended today had as its theme the word, “human” – that simple and that complicated.  Until last week, I planned to attend and to do a talk on what one might call a human information theory of value.  The following from my notes for that talk takes a look at three successively-layered epochs of human information dissemination, which I’m labeling “myth,” “media,” and “meta.”

Note:  This is the first of four parts.  Links to the other three parts come at the end of this post.

In 2000, Michael Lesk, now a professor at Rutgers University, estimated that there were 12 exabytes (12 x 10¹⁸ bytes) of recorded information in the world and that it was increasing at 4 exabytes per year.  Another study at the University of California at Berkeley found that 5 exabytes of recorded information was produced in 2002 alone.  Five exabytes equals 37,000 libraries the size of the Library of Congress’s book collection.  That would put the aggregate amount of recorded information in 2007 in the 45-exabyte range – 6.8 gigabytes (6.8 x 10⁹ bytes) of recorded information for each of the 6.6 billion persons on the planet.

Roll back the calendar 2,000 years and the world’s population was the same as that of the U.S. today – 300 million.  Information then was largely recorded on scrolls.  The largest library of that era was the Royal Library at Alexandria, Egypt, a collection variously given as 400,000-600,000 scrolls at its peak.  I don’t know how much information was on each scroll, but let’s assume that each one was the equivalent of 100 typewritten pages – 200 kilobytes of information each – 100 gigabytes total.  This was a very comprehensive library, but let’s figure that it missed 90% of the world’s recorded information.  So a rough guess, then, that is the aggregate was one terabyte (1 x 10¹²) – just over 3 kilobytes (300 words) of recorded information for each person on the planet.  In 2,000 years, population has grown (mostly in the past century) 22-fold, but recorded information per person has grown some 2 million times!

Of course recorded information is not the only information in the world.  The information coded in Earth’s physical and biological structures no doubt dwarfs recorded information.  Atoms assemble from atomic subparticles and likewise molecules assemble from atoms through information.  Information also determines the development path of each organism and organisms make use of information to survive.  But these information systems are stable enough that one can treat them as effectively closed systems.

The late comic Buddy Hackett affected a bumbling on-stage demeanor and was once invited to replace Curly Howard in the Three Stooges, but his humor sometimes had an intellectual foundation.  My favorite was a classic explanation of entropy – a measure of disorder in a closed system.  While staring intensely at a glass of water, Hackett was asked what he was doing.  Hackett replied, “Someone told me that I could bring a glass of ice water to a boil just by staring at it.  I’ve already got it up to room temperature.”  The Second Law of Thermodynamics describes how the temperature of both ice water and boiling water tend to reach an equilibrium over time – in this case to room temperature – through increasing entropy.

Two thousand years back, an individual could get the equivalent of his or her share of aggregate recorded information – 300 words – in conversation at breakfast.  Today, an individual’s exposure to his or her 6.8-gigabyte share takes considerably longer, even with the New York Times next to the plate and the Today show playing in high definition in the background.  Entropy is still inexorable, but for humans, the “information room temperature” is increasing as we invent ever-more sophisticated ways of extracting information value from the disorder around them.

Part two takes a look at the first of these inventions – the role of myth in human extraction of value from information.  Part three will look at the role of media and part four will look at what I’m labeling “meta” – information about information in a networked world.  --Dennis

Powered by Qumana

Marshall McLuhan and the laws of the media

Ross Dawson just finished reading a 1998 biography of McLuhan and found the following:

One new thing I learned about in reading the book was what McLuhan called the Tetrads, or the “laws of the media”.  it stirkes [It strikes] me that these “laws” are actually highly relevant to strategic analysis of any industry which is undergoing rapid change. I still have to dig up the original material to interpret it properly, but the following is my loose interpretation of McLuhan’s Tetrads.

1. Any innovative technology enhances or accelerates some of what existed before.
[Q: What does it enhance or accelerate?]
2. Any innovative technology erodes or renders obsolescent some of what existed before.
[Q: What does it erode or obselesce?]
3. Any innovative technology retrieves something that has become obsolescent.
[Q: What does it retrieve that has eroded or become obsolescent?]
4. Any innovative technology, when pushed to the limits of its potential, reverses or flips into something entirely new.
[Q: What does it reverse or flip into?]

Link:  Future Exploration Network.

Tomorrow is our permanent address

I've read the book, but never knew there was an LP, which is an entirely different experience.  An MP3 version of Marshall McLuhan's highly produced (for its day) 1968 recording of The Medium is the Massage (1967) is linked,* along with a 2005 restrospective on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death from the Toronto Star, at >> mind the __ GAP.  I linked above to Wikipedia's entry for 1968 so those of you under about 50 can get the context of the amazing year when this was recorded.  *Make sure you get both MP3s -- one is under the word "two" and the other under the word "links."  You gotta hear this.  --Dennis

McLuhanisms

Every so often I get a Marshall McLuhan quote from David Liroff.  Umair Haque links to a web page of McLuhanisms called If It Works, It's Obsolete.  Great stuff!

Liroff (VP/CTO at WGBH in Boston) included two McLuhan quotes in a provocative set of remarks called In the "Global Village", Where is "The Public Square"? to a roundtable sponsored by the Center for Social Media.  Also great stuff!  Link:  Center for Social Media.  Updated 3/5/2006: You can also view a video or download an MP3 file of this presentation at the WGBH Forum Network. --Dennis