 Welcome to the medium is the massage Just a few things by myself right now my balance score is a 9.0 Which is great and the reason why I say that is the organization. I'm with civic or actions Takes life work life balance pretty seriously, and I'm very grateful for that A little bit. I was trained as an artist Which led me to binding a book for Pope John Paul the second a while back started a non-profit art center That's helped revitalize my community in Baltimore. I created the first State online slide registry artist slide registry way back in the 90s I mean musician worked as a been a church organist and I'm currently a member of the Baltimore Mandolin Orchestra of Baltimore's other orchestra and I'm a Drupal engineer evangelists and a Drupal community organizer involved in my local community in Baltimore and and in Drupal for gov the nonprofit that Has oversight over Govcon coming up in July Animus, I'm in its aspiring internet cultural critic which today we're gonna read from the medium is the massage But he's on and there's probably a better way to do this Hi, so the book Which was the title was a mistake at the printer That Marsha McLuhan kind of went with in a very 1960s way It was supposed to be the medium is the message based on his essay understanding media the extensions of man published in 1964 the book was published in 1967 and Shockingly enough all these his essay a lot of interviews on YouTube. I would suggest Taking a look at them are still Still have a lot of resonance today So for instance, he said societies have always Been shaped more by the nature of media By which we communicate them by the content of the communication and this is really the thesis of both his essay and book and And we'll talk more about this as we go on. I think this thesis is still relevant As are many of the things he's Said for instance like easel painting the printed book at a much to the new cult of individualism the private fixed point of view became possible and Literacy conferred the public the power of detachment of non-involvement And we're kind of we're gonna go from the 1960s to the 1860s Then we're gonna go back to 2019 in this presentation and you'll see a little bit Some of these innovations in literature and how they kind of follow McLuhan's theory Electric technology fosters encourages unification involvement And he could be speaking there about the web and the internet But he's talking mostly about television electrical information devices For universal tyrannical tyrannical wound-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and community communities needs need to know kind of Surprising that someone would say that in 1964 So we're gonna go back to the 1860s We've got four American Bohemians Walt women Most influential American poet got Artemis Ward Which was his stage name? His real name is Charles fur brown and he's the first stand-up comic Predating Andy Kaufman by about a hundred years and his act was very much like Andy Kaufman He got up on stage Kind of acted the buffoon People would start to throw vegetables at him and then he would let him in on the joke Right in a very Andy Kaufman Eskway got Mark Twain greatest American humorist Ada Isaacs Menken writer poet and the highest earning actress of her time and Frederick Douglass abolitionist order writer and statesman and why are we talking about these people because there were certain innovations that happened in the middle of the 19th century that Propelled these people from the literary world to the stage to celebrity Let's talk about them. The first is the steam powered printing press which the Baltimore Sun was the first newspaper to buy one of these in the United States back in 18 1846 and You know American newspapers started cranking out And more and more and more efficiently their new their product and Some other innovations There we go. This is what Marsha McLuhan Said about the printing press overnight printing created what we call nationalism one of the facts Was a public so and you can sort of see it the 19th century how You know, it's not it's not a coincidence that coincidence that most revolutionaries have been newsmen publisher publishers writers anyone from Mussolini to who You know calm, you know to Even currently a lot of a lot of people come out of publishing and And jostling things so information is power And then we had the postage stamp which in the middle 19th century Became cheaper and instead of charging by distance They started charging by weight and they brought the price down and on top of that they They syndicated newspapers and publications were able to syndicate so they could send their articles cross-country train pony express very cheaply and so that The talent Walt women there Frederick Douglass Ada Mankin They would have their articles published in publications on the west coast and You know whereas they might be on the east coast and so you had this this spread of ideas that the pony express telegraph Rotary cylinder printing press all these things came together for information distribution So what does that have to do with March McLuhan? So let's talk about March McLuhan He he goes on about cool and hot medium And when it's a little bit confusing Just like this color chart where you have cool reds and hot blues But what do you mean by cool in the sense of jazz instead of 60s culture cool culture kind of You know leaving space, you know quiet Inviting Inviting ideas hot What he means by that is is medium that is filled with information that doesn't leave room for participation in the audience so For instance, he would talk about TV how it creates a meditative state The audience is participating in any he's talking about broadcast television So that you know back then you had two threes broadcast stations that you could Watch and that was a shared experience watching the nightly news every night Like the whole the whole country was watching the same three stations. So it was a particip participatory exercise and As opposed to hot which would be like going to a movie theater like I did last night to see the new Terry Gillum film highly recommend it Where it's a really you're in a darkened room You're with other people, but it's a very private experience or like reading a book where there's a lot of information There's a lot of processing the information. There's not a lot of room to fill in gaps so Let's move on to 2019 and the web You know is the web a hot medium is it a cold medium cool medium and in the end and it's essence no matter what your delivery whether using Your front-ends JavaScript back ends Drupal whatever it is In the end the web is words wrapped by HTML markup which hasn't changed too much since its Invention Initially, we just had basic text some basic formatting hyperlinks later on images and later on video so there's some aspects of the web that we could use to Match it in with some of McLuhan's ideas about hot cold media So discontinuity so the act of reading a web page Is a discontinuous process You might skip over pages you might follow links you're combining Multiple sites multiple pages. You're getting snippets from each. It's a really disjointed process reading a web page The pieces are shared by others, but never in the same way It's not like broadcast television where you've got rock Walter Cronkite You know talking to millions of Americans Passing on the same information with the internet. We're all reading the internet looking at the internet consuming it and in very individualistic ways Now because of the disjoint in this you get something that's called closure Where the individual is Taking the parts in filling in the gaps and we'll talk about this a little bit more later on the presentation We also have segmentation internet technology like specialization and characterization Digital media superpower is categorization You know we all make websites and we're always what's the first thing we do we categorize Content we put things under menus. We organize things for categorizing things. It's something that Computers do well, and so the internet does it well as to But the web audience is also segmented so we're all having these individual experiences There's good and bad here On one hand niche audiences can find a home Niche audiences can find information important to them. They can go to Ravelry comm and share knitting patterns and And get advice from their community You can go learn about very niche cultural things Role-playing games whatever whatever inches you have music So, you know we can split up in the very specialized audiences, which is unlike television And we have a lot of participation in the medium of the internet Unlike television where viewers did not have much choice. We have a lot of choice choices on the web We're taking channel surfing to the extreme How many times do you find yourself staring at your phone? Clipping through Facebook and really nothing's happening. You're just you know a few minutes after that You realize you're just blowing a lot of time not consuming a lot of information But we're we're doing channel surfing on steroids all the time on the internet So the web is the medium At the same time Sometimes the medium can flip and and act Not cool, but in a hot way and and it can be filled with information and information fills all the gaps There's no closure So we can experience it in a very private informative way sometimes but most of the time the web is a cool medium So as people who make the web Are we using the medium to its fullest? Ability What do we mean by the web especially when the delivery is not only the browser anymore or a single type screen we have Multiple devices phones and a lot of you are Looking at them right now We're not completely engaged in what's happening around us Which is interesting. We also have the closed web and we have the And we have the open web and you know what what you know that experience can be a lot different if you're on Facebook a closed web site or even Google or some of the other Sites out there that kind of cordon off their own piece of the internet That experience can be quite a bit different than Two different people How does it affect the way we communicate you know go to a restaurant cafe? You got couples at the table and they're all looking at their phone, you know, and or you have you know Hopefully you're not you know sometimes you're supplementing your comfort your conversation with information So you can't remember a name can't remember a fact. It's supplementing the conversation and that can be a positive thing but it's definitely affect we the way we communicate individually and also as a collective and We're gonna look at a little bit at what changes are happening with the medium. So this is something I I Asked myself a lot of times about you know having you know creating websites working with people with content with design With the back end for you know building the whole thing, you know in the end you build this very sophisticated Internet publishing Thingy and in the end someone just takes a document of word and copies and pasted pastes in it and it's just like You know, it's just like you've you've spent a whole day making a beautiful cake and Someone just kind of like jumped in it, you know, it's just not you know, it's like wait a minute That's you know Or they post PDFs or something or some other offensive practice amongst web professionals, right? At the same time as web creators we do Silly things as well We create websites with photo editing software instead of the tools they're out there and You know, I think that's shifting a little bit There's still a lot of people using Photoshop to design websites, and it might be a part of the tool set But maybe it's not Maybe it should be it shouldn't be the primary design tool The web adopts a lot of Print conventions new often new technology and this is something McClune says new technology Adopts the strategies of the old technology So we lay out the web with newspaper columns Right. We we wrap text around images And images that how are those images really they're there You know a lot of times just for aesthetics You know, we're doing graphic. We're doing print graphic design in HTML and I think it's time to have an awareness of that so we can improve upon what we're doing But sometimes we actually Create for the web and we write for the web We might only now be starting to actually do this. I think The web is still young the smartphones are They're not quite a decade or just a decade old. We're still Getting used to those Wasn't too long ago that like our parents or grandparents Wouldn't have been on an electronic device now everybody is right our children are babies are We're still getting used to this this new Medium the tools are emerging which is good and publications have moved That have moved to the web Even though they were slow to adapt and there's it's been a messy process They're actually some of them are the sites of innovation So this is an article The screen we got an article in the Washington Post You may have may not have seen this it's called too many men it talks about The gaps in the number of men and women in some countries due to government policies or cultural Norms It does some very interesting things There we go. We start to get some Things happening there keep going. It's really beautifully done this article. We start scrolling horizontally Which we rarely think of doing we've got Some illustrations that that move and some illustrations that go So you get the idea really beautifully laid out I find that the The portfolio sites like the hands and stuff where you they're supposed to be inspiring. I don't find them very inspiring So it's kind of hard to find little gems like this so on Is out there we do have some innovations and it's happening some content heavy sites are Creating small innovations and trying to stand out For instance here, we have link previews in Wikipedia not a very You wouldn't think Wikipedia is a innovative site But they do they they have these innovations around the edges So we also have some Drupal modules that do this just to tie it back to Drupal we have external link preview and preview link If you're doing WordPress, there's some plugins that'll do this type of thing In media medium Which I think does a great job making text readable they have this thing called highlights Which can be a little confusing that there are ways of the readers to Interact with the author and interact with the text There so you'll be reading a medium article and you'll run across Like some highlighted text and if you scroll over it, you'll get some options there seeing somebody's comments or sharing That part of the article with social media Took me a while to figure out exactly what they were. I think I misunderstood them The first time I came across them. I thought the author was doing it. I didn't think I Just assumed that I couldn't do something in somebody's article, but it's a neat concept of Allowing the readers to interact with your writing. There's a WordPress plug-in called highlighter. They'll do this. I Wasn't able to find a Drupal Module, I'm sure there are job script libraries that allow you to do this too How are we doing there? And this is a chart of a percentage of text on web pages and You see that it rose keep rising rising to about 2006 where it starts to fall. That's YouTube coming into the picture. So we've got about You know, we you know, we've got Mostly text still but we've got images gaining ground. We have video game of ground article Let me check out. I'm gonna skip over that because we're running out of time. There's a quote from it. This article Is a New York Times piece about the internet. Internet was born in text because text was once the only format computers understood Then we give it eyes and ears smartphones appeared And here's McLuhan an information system dominated by pictures and sound prizes emotion over rationality Yeah, somebody saw it coming 1964-67 Look at the look at his interviews You know, there's some strange dated things like everyone smoking cigarettes on television, but But if you take it with those things away it's still pretty powerful stuff The whizzy wig the thing we all love to love and hate at the same time users love it I think web People build websites that are ambivalent But for content creators, you know, it sort of starts and stops with the whizzy wig I think that's changing, you know, here's Gutenberg but People resist the Gutenberg add-on they hate it or they're very divided We've got Gutenberg for Drupal It's pretty cool And we got a layout so it'll be interesting to see what layouts does for the aesthetics for the content creation process for the actual content and and that's What I'm looking for is like how, you know, the tools that we use to create the content are going to dictate, you know Certain attributes of the content And we need to be aware of that so when we stick a whizzy wig and a site, you know, we're inviting people to use the old paradigm another Paradigm that's hard for us to contend with even though we've been dealing with smartphones and and Tablets for quite a while now is the frame and You know, you know, we can swipe every way now And we still go up and down and that might be Necessary for a while, but that will change at some point. We've got innovation versus convention We have we do have to think about the users and and not jarring them Into innovations. So we do have to balance that thing. You know, for now, you know Probably most of the time we are gonna be scrolling vertically for a while We have to balance that convention easy use with innovation Innovation is tricky because too much you alienate the visitor too little and you lose attention Ubiquity increases comfort. So we always hear in the Drupal world Wordpress is easier to use but is it easier to use because it's ubiquitous or because it's really easier to use When I go in a WordPress site, I'm not as familiar to me It doesn't look like a usable interface or that more usable or you know, there's You know, it's familiar That's what's making it usable Microsoft Google big tech companies understand the power of familiarity So they use it to their advantage, you know, Microsoft sticks applications on people's deck desktops So it's only everybody loves outlook like way back when right and Everybody's using Internet Explorer even though we all knew it was horrible and now Internet Explorer is gonna be using a Chrome back end. So maybe there's hope But the big the big corporations understand that and that's how they That's how they try to influence the market is by creating familiarity by saturating the market Where are we going? I would suggest everyone read this book It is a book about creating comics Written as comics and it's absolutely brilliant and comics have a lot in common with the web paradigm Comics are sequential Web pages are read sequentially Comics use gutters and and frames to create rhythm to create meaning create Associations we do the same thing when we lay out a page Comics have a lot of viewer participation the viewer fills in the action in between the gutter What comics do better than what we do on the web is images images and text trade-off Priority that often things can be said just with images Text is the use of text is spare sparse or economic There are even web comics the comic there are comics that are laid out for mobile devices And so the layout changes for those particular comics and you can purchase apps to browse those Here's a layout. It's a Japanese comic so it's actually being read right to left, but you you can see with very minimal text There's quite a bit efficiency clarity and what the frames are saying The the frames the gutters images create attention. They create a lot of drama in there another thing I look at is, you know, what are my kids looking at and They would prefer to watch YouTube them Streamed programming right you know stream programming You know, it's kind of interesting a stream streaming services. They purchase the the old broadcast television content and and some ways There hasn't a lot of innovation behind streaming, you know, they they would much prefer the DIY content on YouTube quite often They're not biased by that history of broadcast television. They've skipped that They're my kids are the I generation. They've had high-speed internet since the day they were born So they don't have that bias They get YouTube You know, they understand what twitch is and And they prefer lo-fi DIY video over professional productions Another area. I think we need to look more at is games and this is a This is a gorgeous game Design Again by Asian designer. So I had a lot of innovations happen In you know comics a lot of innovations were were in eastern cultures Japan Korea and Same thing with games. There's some the aesthetics kind of reminiscent in a way how Impressionism was was influenced by Japanese art and Here this game called journey. It's just as gorgeous Experience it's just the color the light the graphics and I think we can We can learn a lot from things like that and It'll be interesting to see what those things where those things take us Here's some resources further reading And I would love to have discussion even if it looks like there's not a talk after this which is great We just want to mention a few things Baltimore Drupal camp on Baltimore September 27th. We have a really great camp so if you're in the area look us up and Please don't forget conference evaluations and Sprint's not tomorrow. It's great. I'll leave it at that Any thoughts it's nice to have a more participatory experience I have a half-baked thought so one of the things I One of the things I deal with I work for research organization one of the things I deal with quite a bit is actually presenting research so data scientists visualizations and One of the things that that I do experience is that a lot of our authors are not our authoring encode and I'd be interested to see how this kind of plays out where a lot of the where They're not using WYSIWYG. They're they're using code and they're they're they're including text and video but also experiences applications and and as a matter of fact I can Pretty sure I know least somebody who worked on that Washington post And that you know that wasn't necessary that was done probably outside of their WYSIWYG To accomplish so anyway, just interesting thought that I was just like the fifth into the medium is the message because the code is the Yeah, I mean the comic book. It's very specialized. There's a person who writes there's a person who Sketches there's an anchor someone who draws the black line. There's someone who does the color That can be good. It can be bad as well a lot of collaborative things as matter How you put those things together? YouTubers, you know, you'll see them develop, you know first they're doing the editing themselves And then they have somebody else editing and suddenly it becomes more polished over time It's always fun to go back and watch the first you video they posted and see how they progress because it is Definitely, you can't help but get better once you start doing stuff Anybody else comment before the next speaker gets here? No. Oh, yes Yes Yeah It's fascinating Alright, well, thank you very much and I'll get unplugged