I am a big fan of Marshall McLuhan and think he is due for a well-timed comeback in this the year of his centennial. I posted this great Playboy interview a while back and am now fixated with a new website called McLuhan Speaks. This site archives short video clips of our media prophet in action.

Click the images below to watch some of my favorite short clips from the site.

Here, and ever ahead of his time, McLuhan describes how we will become obsessed with surveilling each other, something that social media often exemplifies.

The “global village” that electronic media creates is similar to pre-literate social arrangements. Many have made this same point about social media, and in McLuhan’s terms, we are becoming increasingly “post-literate.”

In this video, McLuhan explains that privacy -that concept so valued when attacking Facebook or Google- is a recent invention.

The medium is the message.

Video of McLuhan explaining that he only reads the right hand page of serious books because (1) these books tend to be redundant and (2) he enjoys filling in the gaps out of his own “noodle.” Awesome.

McLuhan describing his “probe” technique where he is not trying to describe the truth of a topic, but rather to entice and engage via interesting new ideas -similar to Blumer’s “sensitizing concepts.”

In this video, he discusses that information in the electronic age cannot be caged or monopolized, but instead information tends to be free of restraint and travels quickly. This is similar to Bauman’s idea of liquidity which I applied to WikiLeaks in describing how when information is increasingly digital, it becomes increasingly liquid. It flows across the globe and washes away structures. That is, information leaks.

Inspired by this recent SNL skit:

…the further augmentation of the body with technology.

See the full data visualization here.

I’ve thought it interesting the relative lack of major social media stories to come from the sports world relative to politics, music, academia and other significant public institutions. However, this past Sunday an explosion of Twitter activity was directed at Chicago Bears quarterback Jason Cutler, creating a prime example of how the Twitterverse can change the way people consume sports. And perhaps even how the game is played.

The story begins with Cutler sitting on the sidelines, injured, watching his team lose a game against the long-time rival Green Bay Packers that would have sent his Bears to the Super Bowl. During the loss, Twitter exploded with calls for Cutler to get back in the game. Some of the most prominent criticisms came from NFL players. The rise of social media means that the story -that Cutler didn’t have the heart to rise above the injury- was already being written before the game was over. After his team lost, he was immediately questioned by the Twitter-connected media. With tears in his eyes, Cutler delivered no comment.

This is arguably one of the biggest intrusions of social media into the highly-guarded and secretive arena of professional sports. Today, more and more people, as well as players whose teams had not made it this far, are using Twitter to contribute to a stream of thoughts about the game being played in real-time (note: players are not allowed to Tweet during games in which they are playing). Professional sports are never an activity put on by the few that we passively watch, but increasingly an experience actively created by the many.

This has caused some sports writers to question social media in general:

The twirling twitter feeds of Sunday afternoon changed the story dramatically. You can lament that in our instant gratification world things like facts, perspective and patience have died. That’s true. [Unprecedented social media attack dooms Cutler]

What is potentially most interesting about this story is that it took so long for this to happen on this scale for the NFL in particular and professional sports in general. Welcome to the ranks of other major institutions like academia, politics, journalism, arts, entertainment and so on in dealing with the potentially disruptive new realities of the instantaneous mass communication of social media.

[note: admittedly, I do not follow professional sports closely. Are there previous major social media sports stories that I have missed? Do post those in the comments.]

…and the list is sure to grow in the future. See the full-sized version of this great infographic after the jump.

Via.

Last week, I posted a review of the film Tron: Legacy (2010) on this blog. This week I have a review of Ondi Timoner‘s wonderful 2009 documentary We Live in Public. This review is found in the latest issue of one of my favorite journals, Surveillance and Society.

The issue is here. Free .pdf download of the review here.

I explore theoretical connections between the movie and the rise of social network sites such as Facebook. I look at privacy, publicity, surveillance and our increasingly augmented reality. Many of the points are elaborations of topics posted by myself and others on this blog. It is particularly exciting to see these theoretical ideas travel so smoothly across mediums such as film, radio, the blogosphere and academic journals.

Founder Jimmy Wales celebrating Wikipedia’s 10th birthday. The site gets 400,000,000 per month.

Fed-Ex has created an interactive global data experience on their website to offer “customers intriguing and insightful information to help them stay ahead of their customers’ needs in a continually changing world” (quote is from here). Putting aside the business speak, some of the data and especially its presentation is indeed intriguing. For instance, here is the globe with countries sized, as usual, by geographic size.

Next, we can have the size of the countries displayed based on all sorts of things. Below they are sized by access to the mobile web:

See the global data map here.

Here’s another, this time sized by the proportion of Facebook users:

Jon Rafman is a Canadian artist who provocatively uses Google Street View images. His project is titled “The Nine Eyes of Google Street View,” named after the  Google vehicles that roam around the globe with a 9-eyed lens to create panoramics of nearly every inch of road in the free world. Naturally, many compelling stills can be found within the mountain of imagery.

The Google camera photographs by utility – shooting in all directions at a given interval. This is opposed to the artistic model of photography where a human edits the world into the frame with some creative intent. As Rafman states in an essay about the project,

Google Street Views present a universe observed by the detached gaze of an indifferent Being. Its cameras witness but do not act in history. For all Google cares, the world could be absent of moral dimension.

However, and more critically, we should note that Google is not so nuetral at all. They are seeking total surveillance in an effort to make money. And this is partly why these images are so compelling: the juxtoposition of the “neutral” corporate Google gaze and the raw, candid reality so voyeuristically depicted.

See all the photos here.

See images from the installation.

For the most part, those captured in Street View not only tolerate photographic monitoring, but even desire it. Rather than a distrusted invasion of privacy, online surveillance in general has gradually been made ‘friendly’ and transformed into an accepted spectacle.

Although Street View stills may exhibit a variety of styles, their mode of production—an automated camera shot from a height of eight feet from the middle of the street and always bearing the imprimatur of Google—nonetheless limits and defines their visual aesthetic. The blurring of faces, the unique digital texture, and the warped sense of depth resulting from the panoramic view are all particular to Street View’s visual grammar.