McLuhan and the Palo Alto Process

A month ago I tried to slip past my Patch editors an experimental post in the form of a post-modern tribute to Marshall McLuhan, the theorist who people know of for the expression "the medium is the message." What he was trying to say, I believe, is that nothing that actually appears on television -- the content -- is as profound as the mere fact that the new technology had become so prolific. He said that there were TVs all over the world, and people were gathering there and staring at the boob tube, and buying and voting, and eating, and everything slightly differently. And that was more important, in the end, than who shot JR.

By extension, he would say that no individual app is as profound as the cumulative effect of so many millions (or billions, or "billions and billions" as Saturday Night Live writers but not actually Carl Sagan himself would have said, or did say -- see what I mean?) of you (but not me, yet) are walking around with smart phones and own computers. (I don't own a computer. I am writing this from the Palo Alto downtown library; I am a refusenik; I use the computer but don't own one, if that is a significant distinction, maybe not).

For my original submission to Patch I merely snapped a dumb-phone 640 x 480 shot of The New York Times photo of Marshall McLuhan and repeated as a caption the caption of in the paper, or fragment therein, that said something like "McLuhan something something something about the Internet". That is, nothing I could say about Marshall McLuhan would add much more to the fact that I was posting about Marshall McLuhan, so why say any more at all? (That is, let people search and link and blink for more info, if they like).

The piece was destined for limbo until last night I attended the Planning Commission meeting, for about two hours, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., at a special venue, the newly refurnished Downtown Library. What I noticed, and made a note to try to articulate "brief(ly)" was the fact that the meeting was set up in a conference room with the six commissioners facing a blank wall and a camera and we citizens, about 40 of us, were scattered to the sides and behind them, as if backstage or in the wings of a theatrical stage. That is, what we were attending was a taping and broadcasting of a government meeting, and some of us were participants (I spoke for three minutes or less as a brief "plea" for government and leaders to evoke a dialogue about the future of 456 University Avenue, The Varsity Theatre, and handed out a hard-copy of my letter to Palo Alto City Council of August, 1, 2011 to all six commissioners, plus Chamber of Commerce leader Dan Dykwell) but that the event was designed and pointed towards the taping not the meeting itself. In fact, at two points Curtis Williams, the senior staff member working the meeting, actually asked the $10/hour cameraman if it was time to take a break; the meeting's structure was built around the storage capacity of the camera, not the needs of the people or the content of the meeting itself. We took a ten minute break when he the cameraman needed to change reels.

It reminded me of Oliver Stone's film about NFL football "On Any Given Sunday" in which he makes a similar observation -- and warning -- about how the nature of the game changed when they started stopping and starting the game based on the signals of the cameraman and the needs of the broadcast network, not the game itself -- which is of course now a business or an entertain, think Roland Barthes here and wrestlers, or worse, Guy Debord and "The Society of the Spectacle".

So I am asking here: how does it distort or disrupt or change or hurt the Democracy and "the Palo Alto Process" that it seems the system is designed for people to sit at home at watch television or their computer screens and not come down to the library or City Hall to see or speak without the mediation (it comes between you and Democracy, it mediates, the media does)?

What is the difference between reading my writings here and actually hearing me?