Posted 07:53 by Mark Federman permanent link
Which One Do You Think Will Be More Influential?

...the TV version or the blog version? NBC Universal Television Group President, Jeff Zucker asks, "I don't know why [NBC Nightly News anchor] Brian Williams isn't blogging right now."
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Posted 11:11 by Mark Federman permanent link
The McLuhan Lectures 2005

Our line-up for The McLuhan Lectures 2005 is nearly complete, and it looks like a fabulous series. Running most Wednesday evenings from 17:30 to 19:30, beginning May 4 at the Bissell Building, 140 St. George Street, Toronto, we anticipate the limited seating will fill up quickly.

Each session will begin with a lecture by the featured guest, with a ten to fifteen minute response by a McLuhan or FIS Fellow. Then, the audience will be engaged in a multi-way conversation among the lecturer, the respondent and audience members. The exciting aspect of this series is that it explores the famous McLuhan equation, The Medium is the Message, from unconventional grounds. Don't expect to hear about the Internet, or the demise of the press, or the future of television here. Rather, this series will open minds to the application of McLuhan's ideas to topics as diverse as evolution and fashion, portraiture and psychoanalysis, cannibals and consciousness.

Seating is limited so reservations are highly recommended. To reserve your place for any, or all of the McLuhan Lectures 2005, email the Program, or call 416-978-7026.
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Posted 17:41 by Mark Federman permanent link
McLuhan Programming - Part II

The second big announcement is of wider interest. One of our Senior Fellows, and Adjunct Faculty, Twyla Gibson, is mounting a spectacular speakers series, running Wednesday evenings from May through July, called "The McLuhan Lectures: A series on information literacy in a multi-media age." We will have the full details available early next week, but essentially, Twyla has organized prominent (mostly) U of T speakers (with a few interlopers distinguished colleagues from the ROM and Ryerson :) with responses from (mostly) U of T post-doctoral fellows (and a couple of professorial interlopers, and yours truly :). The topics include evolution, semiosis, portraiture, collections, clothing, psychoanalysis, consciousness, creativity, cannibals, exhibits, music and re-enchantment, all with the over-arching theme of "The Medium is the Message."

We will post the full line-up next week. Admission to The McLuhan Lectures is free, but seating is limited, so reservations are a must! To reserve your place for any of the lectures, email the Program, or call 416-978-7026.
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Posted 17:09 by Mark Federman permanent link
McLuhan Programming - Part I

Two major announcements at the McLuhan Program for this spring and summer.

First, we have just been informed that Twyla Gibson's acclaimed course, Comparative Orality and Literacy has been approved as a credit course for this summer. The course runs Tuesday evenings from 18:30 to 21:30, for 13 weeks beginning May 3.

Course Description
What is literacy and how does it differ from orality? This seminar takes a philosophical approach to examining the division and interplay between oral and literate media in historical and cross-cultural perspective. The focus is on understanding the social, cultural, and religious implications of different technologies for preserving and transmitting images and ideas via speech, writing, print, photographic, electronic, and digital media. We develop a theoretical framework and methodology for understanding different media in terms of the neurological and cognitive processing of mnemonics, orthographies, writing, and the acquisition of media literacy and fluency. The course puts the present era of converging and emerging communication technologies, and the possibility of the new digital, and computer literacies into a wider, more thoughtful and critical perspective on communication and culture.

If you are a graduate student at the University of Toronto, or at another Ontario university and will be in Toronto, and are interested, I would advise you to sign-up now, since enrollment is limited. U of T students can enroll via ROSI; students at other universities should contact the Faculty of Information Studies Registrar to reserve your place, and begin processing the OVGS paperwork.
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Posted 08:18 by Mark Federman permanent link
Mainstream Mass-Media is Obsolesced

By obsolescent, of course, I mean that it no longer has dominant effects in structuring our society. Obsolescence of a current medium is effected by its reversal into a new form by pushing, or accelerating it beyond the limit of its potential. In return, an old, long-obsolesced medium is retrieved. (Those are, for those who are paying attention, three of McLuhan's four laws of media.)

We have seen the obsolescence of mass-media newspaper and television journalism by blog journalism/commentary, in terms of its ability to influence change throughout society - politics, economics, education. We have seen the obsolescence of the recording industry in terms of its ability to influence the music agenda. And now, the television and movie industries are on the way to dodo-bird land.

Downhill Battle, one of the smartest, anti-big-media activists groups going, has begun the Participatory Culture Foundation, that will be launching a free, open source, open content television streaming service, with the software available for Windows, Mac and Linux in June.

We are building a free and open-source desktop television application tentatively known as DTV. Subscribe to a channel and video will download in the background (Channels are RSS feeds, so there's already dozens of compatible channels out there). When a new video arrives, DTV will let you know. It's that simple.

And it goes further: you can turn off auto-download for channels that you want to browse-- pick things that look interesting and they'll go into the download queue. To keep disk space under control, TiVO-like caching will expire videos after you've watched them to make room for new stuff. Keep anything you like and build a video library. Integrated donating via PayPal lets you support creators directly.

RSS and Bittorrent create the opportunity for anyone to make a television channel with full-screen video that can be watched by thousands or millions of people, with no broadcasting costs. Finally, real competition in television and truly independent television becoming the mainstream.

We're building a video broadcasting tool for your website called 'Broadcast Machine'. This free web software is built on top of our open-source project Blog Torrent. It makes video publishing with BitTorrent (or http) as simple as attaching a file to an email. You can choose to add extensive metadata. And the channels it creates are RSS feeds, so the standard is open to anyone.

The implications of this are as astounding for the future of television and television production, as Napster, Grokster, KaZaA and BitTorrent have been for the music industry. Independent producers will be able to launch and syndicate new programming from around the world without going through the major networks. New business models will evolve that will (eventually) figure out how to fund this production through indirect revenues, as has happened with all the other mass media replacements, that are more consistent with the type of consumer to producer reversals we're seeing elsewhere. Conventional television will still remain, of course, and will bifurcate further into ultra-premium content that will become more movie-like, and shlock. Conventional advertising revenues will continue to decline, as advertisers increasingly realize the futility of conventional advertising.

Welcome to Pervasive Proximity TV.
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Posted 08:29 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Next Disruption in Storage

I don't usually write about hard technologies per se, but this one is so close to my heart (literally) and so darn cute, that I'm sharing it with you. A lifetime ago, I worked for Hitachi Data Systems, a purveyor of, among other things, the most reliable, highest-performing, disk drives on the planet. Hitachi has just come out with a new microdrive that uses Perpendicular Recording, which means that the bits stand up, instead of lying down on the substrate. This, in turn, means 10X the recording density on disk drives. For a more, um, animated explanation, make sure you've got Flash on your machine, turn the sound way up, and put on your dancin' shoes!

Clayton Christensen wrote about the disruption in the disk drive market at the points of extreme "acceleration" (to use our language) that saw densities increase by orders of magnitude. This, of course, is a manifestation of McLuhan's media law of reversal. Over the next five to ten years, watch for more disruption as densities skyrocket again, not just in the markets for devices, but especially in other areas that will ripple through policy and process alike.

Man! I can remember when 100 MB drive was the size of a washing machine (and 1 MB of RAM filled a shoe box).
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Posted 11:32 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Lure of the Teleroman - Touts les fils de Gomery

Our server has seen a ten-fold increase in traffic this week from Google searchs on "blog Gomery." When the news first broke our blog was third on the hit list, with the teaser excerpt "the best seat in the house is at the Gomery Commission." Of course that line came from this post about Jean Chretien's balls... err... golf balls, from a couple of months ago, not about the fooferah over the posting over at Captain's Quarters about Jean Brault's testimony, that has been locked up with a publication ban.

From a media theory perspective, this is, of course, fascinating. As the Gomery Commission holds its current round of hearings in Montreal, with the testimony in French, it has become the lastest, and most gripping, teleroman, or soap opera, in a society that loves its soap operas: Quebec.

It's got political intrigue, and allegations of conspiracies, wild parties, drug money, mafia ties, slush funds, attractive female whistle blowers - in other words, all the elements of a great teleroman. Easily distracted Stephen Harper starts beating the "bringin' down the House" drum beat, and it's echoed throughout the land by the conventional media, drooling over the eyeballs that are glued to this unfolding melodrama in one part of the country.

But for the rest of the country? It is a melodrama happening in another language, about incidents that happened ten years ago during a former administration, and, didn't we just pay a whole bunch of money to send a bunch of politicians to Ottawa, so how about they get on with the job of running the country instead of playing partisan politics?

Witness Stephen Harper (or more correctly, his advisors) putting the brakes on the campaign bus before it careens down the hill to political oblivion.

That there is (soon to be, was) a publication ban suggests there is something to hide. The issue of tainted jury pool does not hit the average Canadian in a visceral way (and for some, not even in an intellectual way). It is the secrecy suggested by the ban, the exoticism of the rumours spoken in a foreign tongue, and the need to escape mundane work-a-day reality that makes the teleroman such a compelling form, especially for "reality TV."
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Posted 10:05 by Mark Federman permanent link
Podcasting the Pope

Just as (some) weblogs can be considered as journalism by the masses, podcasting can be considered as radio by the masses. The podcasters themselves being the DJs, as it were, and the users being the program directors. "Let a million radio stations bloom," and bloom on my machine! Here's podcast reports from St. Peter's Square, including the sounds of the night the Pope died. I'll be Father Roderick didn't have to pay over $200,000 to merely reserve the rights to a rooftop (as did CNN for the past year), in order to bring us all the sounds of a passing.

Thanks, Gianluca!
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Posted 18:08 by Mark Federman permanent link
Googling the McLuhan Program

This is where we are (dead centre of the screen). Enter an address into Google Maps and click Satellite. I'm impressed.
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Posted 09:47 by Mark Federman permanent link
Requiescat in Pace - Pope John Paul II, 1920 - 2005

He was the first truly mass media Pope in a way that his predecessors could never be. His travels gave physicality to the electronic communication notion of existing everywhere at once. It is almost trite to say that Pope John Paul II's influence profoundly changed the relationship of the Catholic Church with the rest of the world. Nonetheless, his understanding of the tremendous importance of visibility in the world during his papacy was one of the critical elements of the numerous accomplishments that characterize his success. John Paul II's successor will be ascending to the Apostolic Palace at a time when it is transparency, not simply visibility, that is among the dominant effects. But politics - even papal politics - can wait for the conclave.

It is fascinating how juxtapostions of prominent deaths sometimes occurs. Mother Teresa died shortly after Princess Diana, allowing for comparisons and contrasts to be made. Now, the Pope shortly follows Terry Schiavo to meet their respective Makers. The lessons of the cliched "dying with dignity" cannot be overlooked.

Death is not dignified. Rituals may be, but both birth and death are among the most undignified of human milestones, as well they should be. As we come screaming into the world in a messy, literally visceral gush, attempts at imposing dignity deny our connection to the power of nature. Respect for the intense personal and intimate experience that is birth? Absolutely yes. Imposition of someone else's idea of what is dignified? Completely unacceptable, in my view. This is, quite literally, a matter of family values for the family in question.

Similarly, death is an intensely intimate, personal and private matter, even for a public figure. Approaching the end of one's life - whether one actually shuffles off the mortal coil or is hauled back from the brink - is neither the time nor place to conduct public policy debates. (Been there, done that, no T-shirt to speak of.) It is not the means of death that denies dignity. Rather it is the intrusion of the public into what is inherently private that does the damage.

Pope John Paul II's death was dignified, not because he suffered stoicly, or that he was fed through medical intervention during his last days. Rather, it was dignified because it was deliberately kept far from the public eye. Despite his prominence, and likely because of it, the public did not have the right to participate in, intrude upon or even know what decisions were being made on the Pope's behalf, through the final weeks, days, and hours. Contrast this with the media circus that surrounded the tragedy of Terry Schiavo. While there are many questions, suspicions and allegations, the Schiavo case was less about "dying with dignity" or "the sanctity of life" and more about the dysfunctional state of American politics.

Even in his death, Pope John Paul II is teaching the world about media - those things and situations we conceive and create that structure our lives. During his life, his message was a profoundly simple one - Be aware of all the effects of the decisions we make, because we create the world of our choosing.
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Posted 08:51 by Mark Federman permanent link
Live Streaming of Iraqi Cultural Festival

I just received a notice of this:

Streamtime mission to produce internet radio program from Basrah, Iraq.

From April 1st till 4th the Iraqi poetry carnival Merbed will take place in Basrah, in the south of Iraq. This major cultural event is organized by the Writers Association of Iraq with support of the Ministry of Culture. Merbed is a meeting point for artists in Iraq and in the Diaspora. Some 400 poets, writers and other artists and intellectuals are expected to join this second edition of Merbed after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Streamtime will take part to produce a daily radio program in the form of streaming on the Internet. This will enable a global audience to experience the cultural revival of Iraq. The stream will be available for reproduction by local and international radio stations. The main language will be Iraqi Arabic, with short reports and round ups in English.

Streamtime is a loose international network of media activists dedicated to assist local media to get connected and make use of new media. Streamtime uses old and new media for the production of content and networks in the fields of media, arts, culture and activism in crisis areas, like Iraq. Last summer we realized streaming programs from Halabja and Baghdad. Since then several cultural programs were made in Holland with Iraqi artists and a special on Election Day.

Further information:

Live streams are scheduled from April 2nd from 5 - 7 pm local time (3 - 5 Western European Time, 9 - 11 AM New York Time) The stream will be in mp3 format. All programs are archived.
The programs use Dyne:bolic free and open source streaming software. Financial support by HIVOS. Supported by Aida International.

Contact Irakdesk for more information.

Donations:
Dutch Postbank account 5965559 AIDA, van Ostadestraat 49/a 1072 SN
Amsterdam ref. Streamtime
IBAN: NL63PSTB0005965559 BIC PSTBN L21
ING Bank Amsterdam
Foreign Operations
Po Box 1800
1000 BV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
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