Did McLuhan say the medium is the message or the massage? That and other questions exercised you in your letters and blog pingbacks in last week's letters. We don't have room to print them all, but here it is online.. click through for the full text.
VIRTUAL CHINA (VIC KEEGAN) >> In some quarters, virtual worlds are still perceived as something for grown men who live with their mothers. That's a view that is not only about two years out of date, but it also masks some of the very real uses and applications that they hold. For example, major corporations like Cisco and IBM use it for business meetings in place of the sometimes sterile video conference. And Universities increasingly turn to virtual worlds as a new form of distance learning. There is the often quoted Gartner stat that in five years 80% of regular internet users will have a virtual world presence, and it may well be ventures such as Dotman, as opposed to Second Life that turn that figure into reality. http://www.thisisherd.com/
GIBIBYTES? Why should the entire computer industry change its ancient definitions to compensate for drive manufacturers" perennial dishonesty? (Backchat, 1/11/07). Kibibytes? It sounds like a childrens breakfast cereal... Instead, the IEC should recommend manufacturers use a small "d" in front of their quoted drive capacities, viz: 320 dGB. They could pretend it stands for "decimal', we would know it really means "deceptive'. Chris Rigby, Uffculme
MCLUHAN McLuhan's understanding "that as media become more interactive, they also become more potent tools for manipulation and control" was rather more subtly encapsulated by his actual phrase (and book title) "The medium is the mAssage" than by the misquoted phrase Nick Carr (amongst thousands) wrote in his article. Malcolm Shifrin, Leatherhead ["The medium is the message" was McLuhan's message, and was the intended title for the book: see http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/faqs.html — Tech.Ed]
>> You want to know why so few Americans are engaged in public life or a genuine public dialog? It's because most Americans are too angry over bullshit issues that have little to do with what may or may not be happening. Who knows what is actually happening in the world? Current events has become infotainment. Obviously, knowledge of all the bad things that happen to rich white women helps ordinary Americans tackle problems like health care, the military industrial complex, increasing wealth disparities... Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, Britney's been kidnapped by Scott Peterson. It's taking our jobs, corrupting our children, and selling secrets to the terrorists, y'all. Turns out McLuhan was wrong. It doesn't matter what the medium is — any message can be successful. You just need to find an audience to embrace the message unquestioningly. http://athenasmom.typepad.com/
TECHNOPHILE: BLUETOOTH I laughed so much reading Charles Arthur's winge about Bluetooth earpieces my spectacles nearly fell off. Oh, what problems these gadget kids have to face up to! Congratulations to those drivers who "seem to have mastered the art of wearing these things for long periods of time" and shame on those who haven't! Have you thought about those of us who have to wear "things" in our ear all the time? Surely to solve your problems , the Bluetooth manufactures ought to consult with hearing aid manufacturers whose earpieces have to stay put, fit snugly to cut out external noise and carry a significant load, maybe about 20 hours a day and without driving the wearer mad. On the whole they do a good job! Maybe it doesn't create the right image to have links between boy's toys and disability, but us "One in Seven" would surely benefit from any technological spinoff! Andy Lane, Sunderland
SUGGESTED SEARCH Your newsbyte article on Google and Yahoo providing search suggestions after typing one or three characters reminds me of Clawsoft's TOSS system, previewed by Mike Cook in the April 1987 edition of The Micro User. Sadly it never caught on, and Acorn failed to drive all other computer manufacturers out of the market. Tim Matthews, Bollington
TECHNOBILE (REDUX..) Hazel Davis" article about her HSBC branch (25.10.07) resonated with me. The branch at Huddersfield introduced a wonderful new scheme. A paying-in machine produced a copy of the cheque so that you were then carrying around the payer's bank details and signature instead of a piece of paper doing no more than recording the amount and the date of the transaction. The loss of the former was an open sesame to significant fraud. I never paid in a cheque at that branch again, preferring to seach out the really old-fashioned type where a record was made in your paying-in book and it was date-stamped. Maureen Panton, Malvern
MANUAL LABOUR REDUX Thanks for printing my letter, but did you have to cut it so much that the sense was altered? Since the comments that were blue-pencilled were about engineers, and since the hyphen was dropped from "carefully-crafted" (a typical engineer's "correction"), may I hazard a guess that the editing was done by someone with an engineering background? Of course, it may just be that you are trying to use less paper to reduce your carbon footprint. That would explain why the front-page article on solar-power satellites did not mention Gerard O'Neill, who virtually invented the concept back in the Seventies, and who campaigned tirelessly to get SSP developed and used. Dick Bentley, South Ferriby
