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The Gutenberg Galaxy – first thoughts, from the first pages
Fig. 1. The Gutenberg Galaxy – Marshall McLuhan (courtesy of Amazon and a US bookseller)
Like visiting a library, having a book as an object in my hand, a singular artifact rather than its substance digitised, feels like a visit to a National Trust property. There’s meaning in it, but that way it’s packaged is all a bit ‘historic’.
Mosaic – kaleidoscope – environment – constellation
These are some of the ways Marshall McLuhan may have written about the changing society he was commenting on in the early 1960s with reference to previous shifts from an oral to a written tradition, with a phonetic alphabetic to the printing press.
We like to visualise the complex – to simplify it.
No less so than in what we perceive as a new era – that of the Internet and ever deeper, faster, more complex and fluid, even intelligent ways to communicate, share and think.
In the prologue p.1 we are told that papyrus created the social environment – how?
Immediately we know that Marshall McLuhan will be talking about an elite as if they represent everyone. authors are constantly guilty of this today, discounting those who lack digital literacies as if all that matters in the world is what these people are doing – as if it is above, beyond and distinct from everyone else. Or should we just tackle this interconnected community and ignore those who are not and may never be part of it – those thousands of millions who do not have Internet access 24/7, just as when dealing with previous eras the illiterate are ignored because they voice could not be captured and disseminated?
Society existed before script – so few could write and read would make the impact of papyri irrelevant to all but the smallest of minorities, the elite who could write and read, own and store such things.
The stirrup and the wheel – is offered as a period of transition.
We are to think of this transition as a revolution, just as the development of print from the time of Gutenberg is described as a revolution – not matter how many centuries it took to evolve, and the development of TV from Marshall McLuhan’s particular is another, as the innovation shines such a bright light that it becomes impossible to see anything else. Far from television replacing the written word it has expanded at a time of vastly increased literacy rates and has been complemented to a burgeoning publishing of cheap paperbacks, journals and magazines.
‘Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies like’. (McLuhan, 1962. p.0).
As an aphorism this may apply – by ‘environment’ Marshall McLuhan is once again searching for words, in conversation in the 1960s I would imagine him saying ‘technological mosaic’ and then correcting himself and saying ‘technological constellation’. Several decades on and we may be better able to comprehend ‘technological system’ in the context of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engestrorm, 2006) or ‘technological ecosystem or ecology’ (Bateson, 1972., Lukin, 2008)
Applications of metaphorical notions of ecology, culture and politics can help us better understand and deal with these complexities. (Conole. 2011. p. 410)
Then McLuhan tells us that print created the public – by inference did those who made up the majority in society not exist as a ‘public’ until then?
There is a sense as he later draws on the work of anthropologist X to infer that those with only an oral form of communication are part of an amorphous mass, that literacy empowered a new, though initially quite small group, to gain some kind of status through print.
‘Electric circuitry does not support the extension of the visual modalities in any degree approaching the visual power of the printed word’. Says McLuhan who sees television in the 1950s and the 1960s as something as ephemeral and passing as radio.
Without the research then available that tells us that watching TV is a passive activity that has little impact on the short term memory and next to none on the long-term, McLuhan is saying that electrical forms of the visual have less substance than the printed form of the visual. It isn’t however the means of distribution that is the cause of this, the thesis of all the Marshall McLuhan is remembered for, but the way we behave in front of these technologies – simply put, we sit forward and make an effort to read from a book, even to interpret pictures, but with TV we sit back and let it wash over us. ( Myrtek at al, 1996) Umberto Eco (1989) explains how the read gives meaning to the ‘open’ book, a far more rewarding experienced that the reading of a ‘closed’ text – the same applies to all media -we the viewer, reader, player or participant provide the meaning; the interpretation is our own.
With content from the Internet we can do either or both, or one or the other and the kinds of interaction and engagement that are far more complex and today far more like direct, face to face interaction as we do deals, discuss and debate in live groups and play massive online games.
REFERENCE
Bateston (1972) Steps to an ecology of mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and epistomelogy. New York. Ballantine Books.
Conole, G (2011) Designing for learning in a digital world. Last accessed 18 Dec 2012 http://www.slideshare.net/grainne/conole-keynote-icdesept28
ECO, U., The Open Work, trans. Anna Cangogni, Cambridg, MA : Harvard University Press, 1989 [1962].
Engestrom Y, (2006) Learning by expanding. An activity theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki. Orienta–Konsultit.
Luckin, R. (2008), ‘The learner centric ecology of resources: A framework for using technology to scaffold learning’, Computers & Education 50 (2) , 449-462 http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/2167/1/Luckin2008The449.pdf
Myrtek, M, Scharff, C, Brügner, G, & Müller, W 1996, ‘Physiological, behavioral, and psychological effects associated with television viewing in schoolboys: An exploratory study’, The Journal Of Early Adolescence, 16, 3, pp. 301-323, PsycINFO, EBSCOhost, viewed 9 February 2013.
Related articles
- Revisiting Marshall McLuhan (billives.typepad.com)
- Marshall McLuhan Was At Least Half Right (mayo615.com)
- Musings on Digital McLuhan (smkelly8.com)
- Understanding Online Social Media – 50 years later (lindentweaks.com)
The diffusion and use of innovations is complex – like people.
Fig. 1 Who’s the digital native which one is the immigrant?
There is no evidence to support any suggestion that there was ever such a group as a ‘digital native’ and it is sensationalist claptrap or lazy journalism to talk of ‘millenials’ – there aren’t any. The research shows the complex and human reality. It is not generational. (Kennedy et al, 2009., Jones et al. 2010., Bennett and Maton., 2010) I’m not the only father who knows more and does more online than his kids – we had computers at university in the mid-1980s and in the office within a decade.
Bell and Gemmel fall for the falsehood of the ‘Millenials’. (2009. p. 19)
Fig.2. The devices we use do not split us across generations.
On digital natives or millenials add that behaviours supposedly attributable only to this younger generation are also evident in anyone using these tools and devices – the digitally literate is impatient and is easily distracted.
This applies to anyone who spends much time online. It is not age, gender or race related. We all fidget if downloads are slow or we lose a signal. We’re just being people. It is not generational. Rather behaviours with this tools reflects who we are, not what the kit affords.
Fig. 3. Whether you were born before or after this arrival doesn’t make a jot of difference.
So you here anyone calling our parents the ‘TV generation’, or the generation before that the ‘Wireless Generation’. It is shorthand that is harmless until it is used to define policy.
They refer to those born between 1982 and 2001 as a homogenous cohort, as if they are all born into families where they will have access to gadgets and later the internet as a birthright. The figures given by Bell and Gemmel (2009) stick to those in North America – just the US or Canada too? So what if a few become software millionaires. Others aren’t getting jobs at all. And there are plenty of other ways to earn a crust.
Of the 70 million they talk about how many have been interviewed?
When it comes to the use of various online tools and platforms what actually is their behaviour? Its the same behaviour they’d show out in the real world, at school or in the shopping-mall, making and losing friends. And when it comes to blogging, who knows what is going on. The authors assume (2009. p 20) that there is some kind of truth in what people post – that in my experience blogging for many hours a day since 1999 is far, far from that. Indeed finding the honest voice is the one in 30,000.
There is a considerable degree of fakery, and blatant fiction.
I am reminded of the entirely fictitious ‘Online Caroline’ of a decade ago. She posted a sophisticated blog for the era, with photos and video chat. Like Orson Wells following an audience over the invasion of earth this blog had people calling the police when Caroline’s CCTV supposedly logged someone nicking stuff from her flat.
Bell and Gemmel (2009) talk about lifelogging as a panacea.
Fig. 4. The context in which we learn
There are lessons and techniques that have their place. In fact we’re doing a lot of it already. Through several devices or one we are recording, snapping, storing, sharing, loading, compiling, curating, mixing and remembering.
Every example given is a positive, a selected moment on which to build … what about the times of heartache and memory, of parent’s arguments and childhood bullying. Do we want those? If trying a cigarette, getting drunk, being caught in the open with a dodgy stomach or vomiting?
The authors, Gordon Bell and Gemmel (2009) as well as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (2009) consider four issues in relation to the creation of digital memories:
- Record (digitization)
- Storage (cheap)
- Recall (easy)
- Global Access (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009. p. 14)
A fifth should be how this content is managed and manipulated, how selections are made and how it is edited and fed back to the content’s owner, or how it forms another person’s memory when picked up and mashed online.
As (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009. p. 16) puts it, to cope with the sea of stimuli, our brain uses multiple levels of processing and filtering before committing information to long-term memory .
Could decluttering the hoarders house be achieved by creating for them a digital archive and putting everything else in the bin?
Human Memory
Fig. 5. How we forget. And where software and tools can play a part to help us remember – to create more memories and better recall.
We forget (perhaps an implicit result of the second law of thermodynamics). (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009. p. 21) Or a fact. A neuroscientist needs to get engaged at this stage. What IS going on in there?
Let’s say that memory formation could be liken to the aggregation of coral.
This memory has had no opportunity to fix in this way if it is a snap-shot of the an impression of a moment detached from its context – what was going in, how the person was feeling, what they thought of the events, how these would colour and shape their memory .
We are prone to mis-attribute
Language is a recently recent phenomenon (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009. p. 23) Should we therefore remember in images?
Painting dates back some 30,000 years. The written language is even more recent (6000 years ago) as pictographs became cuneiform became an alphabet – so would an oral tradition be of more value?
REFERENCE
Bell, G., and Gemmel. J (2009) Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
Bennett, S, & Maton, K (2010), ‘Beyond the “Digital Natives” Debate: Towards a More Nuanced Understanding of Students’ Technology Experiences’,Journal Of Computer Assisted Learning, 26, 5, pp. 321-331, ERIC, EBSCOhost, (viewed 13 Dec 2012).
Jones C., Ramanaua R., Cross S. & Healing G. (2010) Net generation or Digital Natives: is there a distinct new generation entering university? Computers and Education 54, 722–732.
Kennedy G., Dalgarno B., Bennett S., Gray K., Waycott J., Judd T., Bishop A., Maton K., Krause K. & Chang R. (2009) Educating the Net Generation – A Handbook of Findings for Practice and Policy. Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Available at: http://www.altc.edu.au/ system/files/resources/CG6-25_Melbourne_Kennedy_ Handbook_July09.pdf (last accessed 19 October 2009).
Mayer-Schönberger, V (2009) Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Related articles
- The idea of gathering a substantial part of one’s life experience fascinates me, as it has often inspired others (mymindbursts.com)
- The power to remember and the need to forget (mymindbursts.com)
- The memory is the mind process happening in your brain, it can never be the artefact that plays back footage of an experience. (mymindbursts.com)
- Bianca Bosker: In Defense Of Forgetting To Forget (huffingtonpost.com)
- Automatically Augmenting Lifelog Events Using Pervasively Generated Content from Millions of People (mymindbursts.com)
- Going, Going, Gone: the Where and Why of Memory Erasure (theepochtimes.com)
- Yahoo’s Mayer lifts sales for the first time in 5 years (economictimes.indiatimes.com)
- Digital Memory (hastac.org)
Blogs on accessibility
A map of parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Parties in dark green, countries which have signed but not ratified in light green, non-members in grey. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Disability in business
http://disabilityinbusiness.wordpress.com/
Jonathan, who has a degenerative spinal condition which means he uses a wheelchair and has carers to assist him, has first hand experience of the challenges faced by people living with disabilities – especially in the business world. “I used to run multi-million pound companies and I’d go with some of my staff into meetings with corporate bank managers and they’d say to my staff, ‘it’s really good of you to bring a service user along’, and I’d say, ‘hang on, I’m the MD – it’s my money!’
Disability Marketing
http://drumbeatconsulting.com/
Michael Janger has a passionate interest in products and technologies that enable people with disabilities to enjoy a better quality of life, and works with businesses to effectively market and sell these products to the disability market.
Think Inclusive
http://www.thinkinclusive.us/start-here/
I think there are two basic assumptions that you need in order support inclusion (in any context)
- All human beings are created equal (you know the American way) and deserve to be treated as such.
- All human beings have a desire to belong in a community and live, thrive and have a sense of purpose.
The important takeaway…when you assume people want to belong. Then is it our duty as educators, parents, and advocates to figure out how we can make that happen.
Institute of Community Inclusion
http://www.youtube.com/communityinclusion
For over 40 years, the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) has worked to ensure that people with disabilities have the same opportunity to dream big, and make their dreams a fully included, integrated, and welcomed reality. ICI strives to create a world where all people with disabilities are welcome and fully included in valued roles wherever they go, whether a school, workplace, volunteer group, home, or any other part of the community. All of ICI’s efforts stem from one core value: that people with disabilities are more of an expert than anyone else. Therefore, people with disabilities should have the same rights and controls and maintain lives based on their individual preferences, choices, and dreams.
Cerebral Palsy Career Builders
http://www.cerebral-palsy-career-builders.com/discrimination-definition.html
How to deal with the following:
- Bias
- Presumption
- Myth
- Skepticism
- Prejudice
- Discrimination
Related articles
- ‘The World Is Missing Out on a Whole Lot:’ Conversation With Disability Rights Scholar Ashley Volion (pattidudek.typepad.com)
- No bank account for people with disabilities (thehindu.com)
- Lawyer on Wheels: Beating disability to change reality (ireport.cnn.com)
- Helping people with disabilities explore sexuality (canada.com)
BLOGS ON ACCESSIBILITY
Jonathan, who has a degenerative spinal condition which means he uses a wheelchair and has carers to assist him, has first hand experience of the challenges faced by people living with disabilities – especially in the business world. “I used to run multi-million pound companies and I’d go with some of my staff into meetings with corporate bank managers and they’d say to my staff, ‘it’s really good of you to bring a service user along’, and I’d say, ‘hang on, I’m the MD – it’s my money!’
Michael Janger has a passionate interest in products and technologies that enable people with disabilities to enjoy a better quality of life, and works with businesses to effectively market and sell these products to the disability market.
I think there are two basic assumptions that you need in order support inclusion (in any context)
- All human beings are created equal (you know the American way) and deserve to be treated as such.
- All human beings have a desire to belong in a community and live, thrive and have a sense of purpose.
The important takeaway…when you assume people want to belong. Then is it our duty as educators, parents, and advocates to figure out how we can make that happen.
Institute of Community Inclusion
For over 40 years, the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) has worked to ensure that people with disabilities have the same opportunity to dream big, and make their dreams a fully included, integrated, and welcomed reality. ICI strives to create a world where all people with disabilities are welcome and fully included in valued roles wherever they go, whether a school, workplace, volunteer group, home, or any other part of the community. All of ICI’s efforts stem from one core value: that people with disabilities are more of an expert than anyone else. Therefore, people with disabilities should have the same rights and controls and maintain lives based on their individual preferences, choices, and dreams.
Cerebral Palsy Career Builders
How to deal with the following:
- Bias
- Presumption
- Myth
- Skepticism
- Prejudice
- Discrimination
Why e-learning is blended and at least two decades old
My interest is over three decades in the making.
How many teenagers are brought up on the premises of a PLC’s training centre?
My late father, in his wisdom, created a business HQ and training centre for the PLC he ran (and created) … and lived over the shop, literally. It was an odd set up for us kids, rather like being the headmaster’s kids. We we roped in to show guests around and as we got older to entertain them at dinner too. I took an interest in the videos created by the likes of Video Arts and Melrose, in the video kit used to develop interviewing techniques and in the wise words of the Training Manager – who put me in touch with a company who were making health & safety films for the Nuclear Power Industry – which in turn, is how I found myself carrying video kit around the changing rooms at Windscale (now Sellafield).
Corporate training is in my blood
The desired learning outcomes are no different to those we worked to several decades ago – people better at the job, content, with career development, knowing what they are doing and where to turn. E-learning has evolved from linear to interactive to online learning, however, at its most fundamental level it is still just a person with a goal, or need – a resource that answers this need or leads towards the goal – and the interplay or interaction, that through engagement and assessment leads to knowledge acquisition – possibly with a qualification, more likely some CPD points or simply an ability to do their job better, with greater confidence, collaborating with colleagues.
Published in 2007, researched and written over the previous 3-5 years, this book intimates the way things are going – or should I say, the way things have gone already?
The world of e-learning is one that moves fast, so fast that the creation of e-learning has become an integrated global industry – companies, often UK based (even with a Brighton bias) span the globe like international management consultancies, law firms or firms of accountants – indeed, the clients are often international law firms, management consultants, accounts and their clients. Does advertising and PR come into this too? Probably. Internal communications? Certainly.
In ‘Preparing for blended e-learning’ (2007) the authors Alison Littlejohn and Chris Pegler say that the ‘integration of our physical world with the digital domain is becoming ubquitous’.
At least two decades ago integration was already occurring, initially internally, through intranets. Leading businesses knew that educating the ‘workforce’ was vital so they had learning centres, while the likes of Unipart (UGC) had their own ‘university’ with faculties and a culture of continual learning. Industry was ahead of tertiary education then and feels light years ahead now with learning created collaboratively on wiki platforms, often using Open Source software with colleagues in different time zones. There is a shift to globalisation in tertiary education, with Business Schools such as Insead, but also with integrated, international universities such as Phoenix buying up or buying into universities around the planet – create an undergraduate course in Geography, a blended e-learning package, and put into onto a campus in North America and South, in Europe and the Middle East, the Far East and Australasia …
‘Learners and teachers increasingly are integrating physical and electronic resources, tools and environments within mainstream educational settings. Yet, these new environments are not yet having a major impact on learning. This is partly because the ‘blending’ of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ domains – or ‘blended learning’ – is challenging for most teachers, yet it is becoming an essential skill for effective teaching’. (Littlejohn and Pegler, 2006 L287, Kindle Version)
I’d like to see a corporate e-learning agency create blended e-learning for a university – and to blend this in several additional directions courtesy of social learning back into secondary education, forwards into the workplace and sideways into the community and home. Perhaps I should call it ‘smudged learning’ – it happens anyway, at least in our household. It’s surprising how helpful teenagers can be to their parents who work online – and it is us, the parents, who appear to click them in the right direction of for resources and tools for homework. I wanted Adsense on my blog(s) my son was happy to oblige – for a cut, which more than takes care of his pocket money.
‘Blending … centres on the integration of different types of resources and activities within a range of learning environments where learners can interact and build ideas’. (Littlejohn and Pegler, 2006: L341)
We’re in it together like a small community in a medieval market town (actually, I live in one of these, Lewes) where the hubbub of the market spills out into the home and schools. All blended e-learning is doing is returning us to a more social, holistic and humanistic way of learning.
Welcome to the blended world.
What new – the drivers for change:
Costs (spreading them, making it count)
Sustainable (shared, flexible resources. In effect, one book can be shared by all)
Methodologies (still about learning outcomes, but treating each student as much as possible as a unique and vulnerable vessel of possibilities – not a cohort, or label)
Complexity (shared through collaboration in a wiki. Academics find this hardest of all, the idea that their mind , or at least parts of it, are open source, to be shared, not held back by barriers of time, tradition and intellectual arrogance. They too are a vessel and in its purest sense their emptying the contents of their heads into the heads of others is what it is all about)
Ethical issues (when is exposure a good thing? How much should we or do we reveal about ourselves? Knowing who your students are should only be seen as an extraordinarily developmental opportunity, not an invasion of privacy).
Decorated ‘in the field’ with the Military Medal by Brigadier Sandilands
Fig.1 Brigadier-General J W Sandilands From The History of the 35th Division in the Great War. L-C H.M. Davson
Brigadier-Gneral Sandilands decorated Jack Wilson with the Military Medal – ‘in the field’ along with three others. He received the Military Medal. Jack described the scene as ‘a square’ with a table in the middle.
There are a couple of likely times for the week long stop in a pill-box without relief – around 11th October when the Steenbeck flooded, after the initial attack on Houthulst Forest when the heaven’s opened, or in November when once again the Broembeck was flooded. He describes the Steenbeck as a ‘lake of mud’ and to reach Egypt House at one time as requiring you to wade through ‘the puddle’.
Fig. 2. A studio photo taken soon after joining the Durham Light Infantry, March 1915 at Billy Wilson’s Photography Studio, Consett before transfer to the Machine Gun Corps or ‘Suicide Squad’
This picture used in the Consett local paper when Jack Wilson was awarded the Military Medal
Fig. 3. Clip from the Consett Gazette in late 1917
(This photograph from a faded original cutting from the paper originally kept by Jack’s mother Sarah Wilson nee Nixon)
Mess as the new paradigm for communications
Plastination of a Ballet Dancer
The skin removed from a human body reveals a mess.
The walls removed from a business does the same. It has happened whether or not we like it, even without Wikileaks we are revealing more of ourselves than ever before.
Glass Skull by Rudat
Our minds are a mess if our sculls are made of glass: mine is, I expose and disclose and share my thoughts.
Posting notes isn’t laziness, it is mess: it is ‘messy stuff’.
It is the beginning of something, or the end, it is both unstarted and unfinished. Notes go down well in our ‘wiki- world’ as it makes space for others to interject, to correct and fix in a way that feels less like criticism and more like collaboration.
Once was a time I’d pick out every misplaced apostrophe, especially concerning ‘its’, now I care less, ditto spelling. Would I have heard the incorrect apostrophe on the possessive of its? Would I have known that I’d hit the ‘w’ key instead of the ‘a’ typing as I am with my left hand only propped up in bed. And what about the missing ‘h’ I’ve left out of ‘thoughts’?
Too late, I’ve said it now and my next idea is coming through.
Asked to transfer to the Tank Corps – May 1916
Out on rest you were able to buy white wine at an estaminet. It was in a side street.
It was one franc a bottle, sometimes half a Franc. Very potent stuff and made us all ill. Our section officer got annoyed about it.
We had these billets, houses that had been knocked about. I was billeted with the C.O. – Parker.
Under the bricks we found this old car.
It was a De Dion-Bouton. We got messing about with this and I had it running. Pity was you couldn’t get it out because the place was so badly damaged, but we had it running. We made a toy of it.
I was asked if I wanted to transfer to the tanks
They were looking for people who were mechanically minded to operate tanks. I said no. I didn’t fancy my chances of carrying out mechanical repairs on a tank under fire in No Man’s Land in day light.
Related articles
- The first Tanks in Battle – Flers September 1916 (17thmanchesters.wordpress.com)
Shot for cowardice – May 1916
There were notices up about these fellows who were executed for desertion.
They were cruel you know
They ran away, poor devils. We had one on one of our guns but luckily our C.O. didn’t report it. He would have been shot. He was an old sweat. I can see the bloke, Harry Peake.
Anyone could see he wasn’t fit to fight.
It was gas shells or something. He got terrified and ran away during a bombardment. He was found miles behind the lines with the transport. He should have been shot. If anyone else had done that. But never mind.
Gerald Woods told me about that.
That was the punishment for desertion. Somebody was shot.
A couple of years later he was found behind the lines again; he’d survived two more years of it. This time he was shot for cowardice on 29th April 1918. They said he was a persistent waster and an example had to be made.
The Germans were massing for a big push, so they didn’t want anyone leaving the line.
Related articles
- The Anniversary of the Battle of Bazentin Ridge 14 July 1916 (themadgame.com)
- Ian Hislop, Michael Palin and the ‘Wipers Times’ (telegraph.co.uk)
- Downloads Through German Eyes: The British & The Somme 1916 (Phoenix Press) (edcabeqo.wordpress.com)
- Book Review: THE DESERTERS A Hidden History of World War II By Charles Glass (politibooks.wordpress.com)
Mind Bursts 