Understanding Media Part II

Media is explained, as Marshall McLuhan saw it, as a staple in the same way that corn or oil is a commodity. For every new staple, there’s an adjustment in the society at large. There’s an adjustment taking place in society with the way we process media. The instantaneous nature of information leaves us numb to the ad wars that used to rivet the chattering classes and the pollsters. People are affected by their own version of news, be it conservative or liberal or moderate. We can adjust the thermostat, the temperature controls to hot, medium or low as we like it. That means that politicians and advertisers must figure out new ways to reach the customer.

Emails and embedded messages, the subliminal acceptance is always important. Repetition and branding, the idea that we watch an ad without really knowing what product is even being sold is vital in the new medium. As McLuhan saw it, the content can’t offer clues to the “magic behind the media”. Or to the subliminal changes that occur in society. Those changes are occurring now. Trump just stepped on the gas and pushed the pedal down in a slowly accepting public ensconced in a fast-moving media environment.

 A world where anything is possible

What was possible then? After the invention of the Gutenberg Printing Press, what followed? In order to explain the society and to understand our age of Mass Media as we assimilate into the Internet Age, we need to look at the master of media, Marshall McLuhan. Mcluhan wrote about media over fifty years ago, and the things he wrote about are just as relevant in today’s world.

 After Gutenberg, came the Medieval Guilds and individual enterprise, where before the printing press, individual business guilds couldn’t have existed under the feudal system. Trade monopolies emerged with the guilds. A sense of Nationalism triggered the rise of the first superpowers in Europe. The British Royal Navy, the Spanish Armada and on and on. The Revolutionary War with the printed words from Thomas Paine and his Common Sense pamphlets and the newspapers of Benjamin Franklin were made possible with the printing press. The splintering of the Christian religion from Catholic domination to Protestantism, after Martin Luther was able to post his Theses on the door of the church,  was only possible after Gutenberg. The American Civil War erupted from the roots of the writings of abolitionists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe with her best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin. None of these events would have been possible without Gutenberg and the Printing Press. Knowledge and information flowed ever more freely, and the masses became enlightened.

Now we look at the Internet. Already we are seeing such phenomena as the Arab Spring uprising, the rise of ISIS (not all things are necessarily good discoveries!), online dating, Facebook, Twitter and Social Media, Gaming, Drones, privacy issues and Big Brother, smartphones and cell phone tech, the rise of the Independent voters and the Utopian Dreamers who are all caught up in the constantly evolving Matrix that is only possible with the coming of the World Wide Web-the Internet.

 So many things we couldn’t have imagined without the Internet and the Computer Age. We are still in the early days of a great cultural shift. Where does this road lead?

(Stay tuned for the next installment...Where are we going with this?)

 

Notes from a Native: Know the Territory!

 

·        Some thoughts on the horrifically horrible week that just ended in Orlando. First the death of the young singer from "The Voice". Next, the worst mass shooting in US History. Now, an alligator kills a two year old at Walt Disney Resorts.

It's a sobering thought as we think of Orlando as a fun-filled resort town. Orlando's governing body have just had to find spaces to bury up to forty plus young people in their cemeteries...

   One thing that people who live in Florida know is that Disney was built on top of a swamp. And if you have small dogs and children, you don’t let them go to the edge of a lake alone.    Dogs are constantly being pulled under by gators. My cousin fought one off in Immokalee, Florida and she won! The gator let go of Dixie, her Golden Retriever. Sara Lee is petite, and her Golden was fairly large, but she was able to fend off the gator.

Scores of people have told me of gator attacks on dogs. And when some old gators are killed, they have been known to find many collars from hunting dogs that disappeared in the bowels of the Florida lakes.

Someone should let the people who come to Florida know the truth. Florida was not just this white sandy beach that popped up with pristine and manicured lawns. The Disney World land was carved out of a swampy area in Central Florida.

Florida is known as the Land of Flowers and beaches. But there is more to it than that. There are orange groves and sugar cane fields, there’s marshes and lakes and swamps and gators. All of these things are native to Florida. It’s not exactly the dark side, but it’s the side known only to Florida natives, and Florida Crackers.

Know the territory, as they said in “The Music Man”. You have to educate people about the history of a region, even if you are going to bill it as “the happiest place on Earth”. You should know that there’s another side to the land of Disney. Welcome to Florida, the Sunshine State, complete with Gators and mosquitos, with oranges and semi-automatic weapons and over-crowded highways. Know the Territory and Welcome to Florida!

A Return to Understanding Media

 

 To understand the phenomena that is Donald Trump, I went straight to the source. The source in terms of understanding media is Marshall McLuhan.  McLuhan wrote Understanding Media over 50 years ago, and I wanted to find out if the ideas that were revolutionary then might still apply in the Computer Age.

 

Sure enough, some of the controversies and media hype surrounding this campaign season were things that could be plugged in to the ideas McLuhan wrote about in the sixties. For example, the idea of subliminal acceptance was one that McLuhan equated to be like a prison without walls. “If you cannot see where you are going, how can you be free?”, he asks. In that sense, the type of mindless pabulum that we, as viewers and consumers of mass media, have been subjected to, not only in the political campaigns, but through television and electronic devices and mass media at large come into question.

 

We have become numb and disbelieve practically everything we hear or read! That’s one of the take-aways from this election season. It’s no wonder that the Pied Piper in the form of Donald Trump has mesmerized people by telling them to wake up. He is figuratively slapping people in the face and telling them to stop the subliminal acceptance that is around us. Bernie Sanders has done the same.

 It’s thinking outside the box that people profess to admire. And it’s akin to one of my favorite films. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy lives in a black and white world until she opens the door to Oz and discovers this beautiful new world surrounded by bright flowers and little people wearing gorgeously colored clothes. That is the figurative reasoning for the 21^st Century acceptance of the Trump phenomenon.

 

The Readers Hub Newsletter

The Readers’ Hub Newsletter

              Friends: Here’s my pledge to you….sign up for The Readers’ Hub here

          http://authorp.blogspot.com/

 and I’ll send you updates about my work and interesting trends and ideas I come across. I hate spam and don’t like to get reams of e-mails either, so I’m not going to be bugging you with too many annoying updates! (Two times a month-topsJ)

Here’s a few odds and ends I’ve collected as I’ve worked on various projects around the internet. Every month, I’ll send you a short note. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy! –MLJ

Weddings, funerals and retirements have been the focus in this year of our Lord 2016. So many friends and family members, and fellow Baby Boomers are now retiring. Children I helped to raise are now marrying and starting families of their own. And some people, good people, tend to die too young…

 

·         The Writers Hub: Weddings and retirements are featured, as well as Notes from a Native, and The Blurb Blog, all part of the newly incorporated one-stop blog shop:The Writers Hub.

·         6 Degrees Summer Newsletter is out. New releases haven’t bowled me over of late, but critics these days are working with less material from even more film sources. So we have to separate the wheat from the chaff. See what’s coming in 6 Degrees of Film at the Movies.

·         Non Profit News debuts this month. Working in a church gives me an overview of not only issues that affect us here at home, but globally. See the list and the links in NPN.

·         The GF Writers Cooking Journal is the home of our magazine of the same name. Eventually, the book will debut! Meanwhile, check out the encore posting of the excerpt: “Marge & Dad: A Love Story” on the blog.

This summer promises to be as productive as all summers tend to be. You go in with a bang, thinking you’ll have plenty of leisure time and lazy days to finish that novel, clean up the mess in your {fill in the blank} and to just chill and relax. It all sounds good and it goes so fast…Proof is in the picture below, of my niece Kirsten, now married and expecting her first child. Oh, how time flies!

Please connect with me through The Writers Hub and sign up for monthly updates. Here’s the link….Or go to  my website: 6degreeswriter.com. You can also e-mail me at mljtpa@6degreeswriter.com.  I’m on Twitter @mljtpa. My Facebook connection is just Mary Lee Johnson.  I’d love to hear from you!

Tis the Wedding Season

 

Jane Austen always ended her stories with a wedding. So it seems fitting that the final episode of Downton Abbey closed recently with another wedding. This is the season when weddings abound.

 Spring blooms forth, and those of us ridden with allergies reluctantly peek our heads around and venture out to participate in weddings and picnics and walks in the park.

 With a wedding in the works in our immediate family, all eyes are on the bride and groom, along with the upcoming shower and pre-nuptial events. There are engagement photos and bridal showers, the catering and flowers, the planning and the all-important dress.

 

All of these things condense to a point where we are left wondering where the fantasy ends and the reality begins. One of my favorite bits was from an old Bob Newhart show where Bob tries to bring the prospective groom back to Earth with a reality check on the practicalities of day-to-day life for a young couple. To which the young man responds, ‘To heck with marriage, Bob, we’ve got a wedding to plan!”

 

So apropos is that remark when staring down the barrel at another young couple’s approaching wedding date. No practicalities can match the starry-eyed fantasy attached to a young girl’s Dream Wedding.

 

If only we had a society where high school and beyond came equipped with classes designed for reality. “Everyday Living with Others”, “Budgeting”, “Compromise in Relationships”, “Learning to swallow your pride” and “Love means learning to say you’re sorry-several times in the course of a day!”

 

So with great regret we pause and consider the fictional world of Downton Abbey. And then, we consider the fictional world we imagined when we were younger. Then… Life Happens. Jane Austen had it half right. Life begins when you are a young and dewy eyed bride or groom. And happily ever after’s are found in the fairy tales of young children. But for most of us, Life is what you make of it, and at times, you must turn the Lemons into Lemonade!

 

For Retiring Baby Boomers: Life is what you make of it...

 

For Baby Boomers, it’s that time. There are so many friends and family members retiring soon. It’s such a finality. The boss I have loved working with for the past ten years will be gone soon.

What’ll I do? When you …

Are far away..

& I am Blue…

What’ll I do?

 

As my mother told me many years ago, “All of Life is about change.”  And I would add that it’s about how we adapt to change, really. I started my working life when computers were as big as a car. Now we run programs on micro-chips the size of a fingernail.

 

I was born in the fifties during the Cold War.  Back then, we were afraid of nuclear annihilation.  Now, we are living with terrorists who threaten to take us back to the Dark Ages. We are faced with the phantom fear of beheadings and torture. The irony is that technology has become so advanced and we still look back at fears that haunted us in the Middle Ages.

 In spite of this, we have seen incredible breakthroughs in science and technology. The Golden Age of Information Technology has arrived. We are braced for many more wonderful discoveries in the 21^st Century. It’s like standing at the peephole of King Tut’s Tomb. What do we see? Wonderful Things! Many more advancements in medicine and in future technology that will enhance the way we live our everyday lives are in store.

 And still, we tend to be a bit sad to see things change. As McLuhan said:

 “When faced with a new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in ‘Bonanza-land.”

 

I have long suspected that retirement would open up this Brave New World for Baby Boomers. Those of us who feel that there is life, a vital and productive life to be found on the far side of fifty, should feel energized and re-vitalized about this Golden Age we have landed in. And that’s why the gift of Retirement and Old Age may be a Blessing or a Curse. Old saws still apply.

 

Life is what you make of it. So Viva Retirement and Bring it On! We Baby Boomers have survived so much, and so we will look forward to all that the future holds in store.

 

Diary of a Low Tech Girl

In Part 1, I've been writing about some of my frustrations as a "Low-Tech Girl, living in a High-Tech World." In Part 2, I've continued the theme of living with low-tech skills by sharing some notes that I've accumulated through the years while trying to learn more about Marketing and Search Engines and Data sharing and other elusive topics. Here's some diary excerpts from a low-tech girl:

Dear Diary: I learned a little bit more about link building today. You are going to have to just suck up and look quite obvious and needy as you are grasping at the straws of relevancy when you build your links.

 
Dear Diary: Metadata was a fun new word. It’s like a baby with one of those mobiles you attach…look at the pretty things spinning around! What are they?
 

Dear Diary: Back links are links that…what the hell? Who cares what they are called!?

 

Dear Diary: Platform & Branding are two new words that I have decided to ignore as a writer. They seem to be made up for those impotent people (Remember the joke about the pimp who went to the doctor and came back with new platform shoes and fancy clothes?

 

Joke:

 What did the Doctor tell you?

Pimp: He said I was “Impotent”…..Lots of impotent people will tell you about Platform & Branding.

 Dear Diary: SEO means Search Engine Optimization but is sounds way better when you just say SEO because it’s like the Seinfeld episode called “The Dealership” where Jerry gets Putty (Elaine’s car salesman boyfriend) to confess about the real reason for the Sealant under-coat for the new car

 Jerry: You don’t really do anything to the car, do you?

Putty: (confesses with a laugh): “We don’t even know what it is!”

 SEO is like that…. LOL-We don’t really know what it is!

 Dear Diary:

 

·         Hyperlinks sounds like a made-up word from a Star Trek geek.

·         Content Curation is manna from heaven for writers. Because instead of coming up with ideas, you just scroll down and troll through the archives to pull someone’s blog post and then just pretend you are back in college writing a paper and it’s due tomorrow. You summarize the work and change the title and submit it with fingers crossed, hoping for at least a B Minus.

·         Google Penalites sounds like something from Fantasy Football or the like.

·         Dear Diary: Marketing means just about anything these days. Lots of jobs for kids fresh out of college revolve around some form of Marketing…whatever.

·         Dear Diary: After going through my web design course and my in-bound marketing course I have a new password: Ihaveaheadache…oh yeah, I forgot. There has to be a number plus an extra key…How about; Ihaveaheadache#1000!?

·         Dear Diary: Every day, tech gives me a headache. People who wrote for a living used to simply sit and write with a pen and paper. Then typewriters came along, and it’s been downhill from there. Changing the ribbons and figuring out the margins and then the page setup on a typewriter was bad enough.

        Now we do nothing but worry about the process. And the writing classes are hilarious, because people older than myself (I’m a Baby Boomer) think that we are doomed as a society.

     Young people don’t understand what the fuss is about. And Baby Boomers are stuck somewhere in the middle. We Boomers are old enough to remember life when computers filled a room and the blinking DOS cursor was all that was known about computing.

     Now, we have to know the “process” and writing is secondary. There is data about the amount of time a person will actually read the content on the page. We scan a page and leave after about eight seconds. McCluhan was right-The Blurb is the word.

·         Dear Diary: Now all of our Titles are analyzed, and you have to hook the audience right away! The speaker in our Marketing for Writers Workshop says with a straight face,

       “ Number 1 on the List to sell your work is a Good Looking Cover."  Then he gets down to Number 5 or 6 on the list. That would be… "Good content! “

·         Right? I’m not kidding, this was part of a workshop I attended, and I was the only one laughing. Jane Austen, where are you when we need you?

 

Dear Diary: I am taking the day off and taking a lesson from that sweet looking older lady who was caught in the photo of a crowd of phones, with people around her taking selfies, while she simply watched and took it all in as she just enjoyed the moment. I might just take a walk-and enjoy the day. And leave the phone behind!