Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan is best known for popularizing the idea of a “global village” long before the advent of the Internet. But that’s not the most amazing prediction he made about the evolution of media. Without knowing it, he probably predicted Instagram as early as 1964.
Instagram and TikTok too. Anyone who ventures there knows that these two social networks are almost exclusively devoted to photography and video. They are also sources of information increasingly consulted by millions of young Internet users who use them to keep abreast of current events. Of course, learning about Instagram is an experience unlike reading a newspaper and watching a newscast — which, as its name suggests, is essentially a newspaper presented in television form.
In Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, McLuhan introduces a concept that, had it instead been stated half a century later, would have made for an extremely interesting message on Twitter. “The message is the medium,” he wrote. According to him, it is not so much what the medium contains or diffuses that counts, it is what it represents for the advancement of human culture. Television, by its effect of bringing people together for millions of people in the world, was for him the opposite of a book or a newspaper, which required time spent alone to appropriate its content.
Naturally, it was quickly said at the end of the last millennium that the Internet embodied the very essence of the other expression popularized by McLuhan, that of the global village. Twenty years later, and sixty years after McLuhan’s thoughts on mass media were first published, perhaps this expression should be revisited. Because we understood it upside down. What the Canadian thinker said about it at the time and the interpretation made of his global village with the emergence of the Web no longer holds water at a time when social media is the dominant technology on the Internet.
Niches and superniches
“It must be extremely exhausting having to explain to your readers each of the new technologies that are presented to you,” exclaimed to the author of these lines, a young Alberta influencer whom he met at a technology conference organized in early June. when he realized that The duty mentioned on its name tag was a daily Web and printed newspaper from Quebec.
With an elaborately trimmed red beard and probably the same glasses that Sylvester Stallone wore in the movie Cobra, released in 1986, the young man could as well have presented himself as a future anchorman on Canadian television. But no. His job — because it is one, and he is lucrative if we are to believe the half-dozen of his English-Canadian influencer counterparts who also crossed paths that day — consists rather of supplying short, enticing videos to an Instagram account and a YouTube page.
“I don’t have to do that. I have subscribers who are already tech savvy, and my channel is a niche, very specialized channel. “A moment later, he and other youtubers gathered at the same table were bickering to try to determine which keywords inserted in the title of their respective publications would attract the most Internet users.
The pandemic has made exchanges like this a lot more common in media events. You could count a few influencers in a crowd of journalists before 2020. In 2022, it’s completely the opposite.
Obviously, when you print a newspaper every day, you don’t have the same needs as when you feed a channel on YouTube. The challenge is not the same. Writing 6,500-character articles every day leaves a lot of room to explain, detail, enumerate.
On Instagram, the length of a video that is considered “optimal” to gain popularity according to the guides to help future influencers is 26 seconds. She is 7 to 15 seconds on TikTok.
village-tribe
Another concept dear to Marshall McLuhan was that of “hot media” and “cold media”. This categorization was quickly criticized, and McLuhan himself had to revise his interpretation when he saw the quality of television broadcasting improve markedly during the 1970s. The ultra high definition television we know today would have probably knocked down his typewriter…
An interpretation that has been given to this concept still holds up very well even today, if not even better. The “hot” media are those which, according to the author, most emotionally engage the public, who have information delivered to them in such a way that they do not need to provide intellectual effort to complete it. blind spots.
Like television, the Web of 20 years ago would probably have fallen into the category of cold media, media whose bandwidth is too short to provide engaging information and which, so to speak, force the public to imagine the missing pieces to fully understand the message.
With its 280-character messages, Twitter is definitely a cold medium. Instagram and TikTok fall into the opposite category. Moreover, it is they — the hot media — who were to embody the famous global village predicted in UnderstandingMedia. Not a village in the sense of a public square for the entire planet, but more like a collection of tribes, each united around the messages that its members find most engaging.
Academics who have analyzed McLuhan’s text even believe that he predicted the return of oral tradition in mass communication, to the detriment of written communications.
You can’t say he was wrong. The video as we find it on social networks also uses the mechanisms of this tradition: allegory, seduction, commitment…
Arguably, McLuhan predicted Instagram… 60 years ago. Now try explaining that in a 7 second video!