Cohere

"The Medium is the Message"

"In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."

-- Marshall McLuhan

IRC is not blogging.

Mena Trott, president of Six Apart which organized Les Blogs, was speaking on civility and accountability when she pointed out an example of rudeness on the IRC back channel projected behind the speakers. Mena apparently confused the media of blogging which is often related to newspaper editorializing with IRC chat which is related to chatting with a group of friends and passing notes in class. They are different mediums of expressions with different rules. One doesn't project the notes students pass in class during a lecture onto an overhead projector without editing. Or put the gossip of students over the school PA system without moderating them. The same goes for projecting an IRC back channel during the Les Blogs sessions. The fault was not with the IRC participants but with the lack of appropriate moderation.

Unfortunately this mix-up seems to have gone mostly unnoticed and bloggers continued talking past each other. Dave joined in, disagreeing with Ben Metcalfe and Tara's positive assessment of him. Both pointing to broad concepts of net accountability and the individual being the determinant of the net. These ideas don't contradict each other or compete. And the confusion of misidentifying the nature of the mediums remained in the background.