From Business World to World Events, The (Social) Medium Is Indeed the Message

In his centenary year, Marshall McLuhan is as relevant as ever. For example, I just returned from a meeting at The Philadelphia Business Journal, where I spoke to the staff about possible speaking engagements. The hot topic that many hopefuls were proposing were the social media or Web 2.0, the media that are "pushed" to audiences.

However, far from the Philly business world, we are seeing those same social media helping to foment democracies in the Middle East. Whereas the Federalist Papers and other pamphlets fueled the American revolution, and in the way megaphones stoked American students in the 1960s and '70s, protesters in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia and other countries are organizing through Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore, these same media are allowing the world to see what is happening in these countries, uncensored and free, in many senses of that word. Both the facts and the spirits of these events are spreading.These events demonstrate just how much ahead of his time McLuhan was. He defined media as "any extension of ourselves," and that included new technologies. Though he was writing in the mid-20th century, he was analyzing not only traditional media, (print, radio, TV), but also computers, which at that time were pretty much limited to entire floors of corporate buildings. He understood early that the structures of these media would affect how we perceive the world around us.

For those of us who are promoting ourselves or our organizations, the social media/web 2.0 must be considered part of the mix, if they're not already. We are seeing how the traditional media are chasing the "new" media to get their leads or fill in the facts of a story. Certainly the people of the Middle East get it, and their worlds are reshaping as surely as they did when the Communism fell. It is exciting to see, and we can. Lucky us.