Here is a little text I had quickly put together for one of my previous classes, I adapted it to fit this entry a little bit.
While I understand that Facebook is an extremely important tool that we all use, social phenomena none of us can escape and excellent example to illustrate many concepts shown in class, I feel like the discussions generated by the students is completely useless in our understanding of media, technology and how it actually changes us as humans. Here is my explanation.
Technology in the broad sense of the term is always twofold: it has a medium (many people like to call this the container), and content (the substance). This is true for many things in life (think of a gift – box and present, packsack – the actual bag and its content, a webpage – the frame is it built with and the content separated from it and perhaps even humans – body and soul). When we think of technology (not just digital – a book, a hammer, a car can all be considered technologies – basically any scientific advance that is supposed to benefit humanity) the duality of its nature is always present, and this is even more critical when we deal with media. Let’s not forget that media includes text and images, but also audio, video and more. By defining media as I just did, Facebook as a digital technology would be considered as media, since it is comprised not only of text and images, but also video and audio.
The separation between the medium and the content is crucial here, but which is which? As the media theorist Marshall Mcluhan put it, the content of a medium is usually a new medium that also has its own content. To make this simpler, let’s take the example of the television. The television itself is a medium, and its content could be the MuchMusic channel, for example. The MuchMusic channel is a medium, and its content would be music video clips. These clips are in themselves a medium, who in turn have an idea as their content (could be other things, depending on the intention). If we transpose this to Facebook and go back up the chain, the Internet is the medium and allows for various contents such as telecommunications, games, email, file sharing as well as web pages. This is the category Facebook fits in.
Facebook defined as content made possible by the internet is merely a tool for its users, in the same way that YouTube is, or the way that MuchMusic is content, or a tool (passive one) for the medium that television is. When McLuhan was talking about the separation between the content and the medium and its effect on people and society, he claimed that the “The medium is the message”. The actual message than any media holds is the medium itself, not its content. The message, which is the important transformations that result from the medium that will affect us, is not what is shown on TV, but the fact that the TV itself exists. If we take the example of the car, the message that it has to offer is not the fact that we can, as individuals, easily go from point A to point B in a rapid way, but rather the fact that this technology is responsible for creation of roads, suburbs and new ways to conceptualize urban development. As for the TV, it doesn’t really matter what is actually playing on it – what’s important is the fact that we have it, that it changes the relationship that we have with other humans, with institutions, with our direct families, our environment, the way we access information…the list goes on and on. The impact of the the TV’s existence is what matters, because it is what changes our world, not American Idol, The Simpsons or a hockey game. These instances are content, and will be swapped as soon as the context changes. The TV stays, and changes the context.
Taken from the Wikipedia entry for ‘the medium is the message’, Mcluhan has been known to say that “people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. Specific content might have little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children’s shows or violent programming, to give one example — the effect of television on society would be identical, and profound.”
Facebook is content. The same way that Windows or Firefox or Blogger or Twitter or Google or Photoshop or MSN are content. They will eventually be replaced, because the medium will be in a new context, and the medium will have a new message. Even if many think Google will stay eternal, I am completely certain it will disappear the same way science as we know it constantly disappears to leave room for new discoveries, new concepts, new messages. I remember the time when ICQ was the king of the internet (of chatting anyways), and we never thought it would go away. We have barely started to develop the internet yet, I can’t imagine how much transformation it will undergo in the next 10, 20, 50 years to come.
Telling our personal stories about Facebook is very entertaining for all of us, yet is it extremely alienating in the sense where there is nothing but subjective matter and because it is a personal experience, it closes off all discussion or possible debate. Comparing anecdotes or the amount of friends we have is fun, but not getting us anywhere. If we want to understand how media, mediums and technology actually affect people and society as a whole, we have to be a bit more ambitious in our discussions. Our brain is extremely malleable and the internet is completely reprogramming the way we think as individuals, groups and as a society – and I believe that understanding these changes are key. Facebook is a great example of content for this medium, but making it the center of discussion is to miss the point.
