I have been looking at how to apply Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Media to the Web for my next post on cloud computing. For a “hard” scientist, McLuhan is as close as we will get to Newton in Sociology for understanding how technology effects society. His Laws of Media are as rigorous as Newton’s and his equation – “the medium is the message” – as famous as Einstein’s “E equals m c squared” if not as equally obtuse.
One can be easily lulled into believing it is simple and straight forward. Though McLuhan’s presentation may seem flippant, the sociology in the background is serious and complex. Indeed it is the background or context of technology that at first seems unmoved and unchanging that does eventually change in ways that might be missed because the changes appear unrelated. But it is in understanding both the obvious implications of a technology and the not so obvious effects on culture and society that transforms technology into media in McLuhan’s view.
For example, an obvious and much anticipated characteristic of the internet is that it “makes the world much smaller”. One might expect in the free exchange of ideas and knowledge that the world as whole would become more unified. But as we look at society, it is anything but unified. Can the Internet as a medium be responsible for this?
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From my blog analytics, I can actually see the eyes rolling as my audience quickly skirts my Cloud Computing posts to go to the old stuff (back when I was funny). In some ways I understand the ambivalence. I perhaps like you are not overtaken by awe with virtualization and utility computing that defines cloud computing today. I would call this more cloud hosting than computing. My urge is to go beyond this in an attempt to grasp the computing part of the cloud. Understand what new capabilities may be facilitated and computations performed. So why should you care?
