Medium is the Massage and Live Online Courses
#6 Productize Philosophy
Hi, Everyone.
Today's letter will lead into a long-form essay that I wish every single one of my subscribers reads. Let's begin.
Data is simply Bits. Text. Images. Sounds. Smells. Tastes. When these are interpreted by us to mean something, we call it Information. The next big concept is Medium. Mediums are basically containers of information, that stores and projects information in space and time. The book is a medium. Twitter is medium. You are a medium.
As product designers, we are often tasked with the purpose of creating these mediums. Philosopher Marshall McLuhan is famous for a simple observation: the medium is the message, which means there is more to learn from the effects of a medium (radio, television, the internet, etc.) than the messages distributed via that medium.
The next passage is from David Perell's What the Hell is Going On:
Medium is the MAssage
David Perell explains:
"The shape of the media environment determines the structure of society. The environment that new technologies such as the internet create is more important than anything it is used to transmit. Every major communications breakthrough re-shapes our environment, re-structures society, and re-wires human consciousness."
Even if its effects are subliminal, communications technologies are no different. They affect the social, economic, political, and religious patterns by which a society operates. For example, the alphabet led to the emergence of nationalism, individualism, mathematics, industrialization, mass production, the Reformation and the Renaissance.
As McLuhan observed:
“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work as environments… But environments are invisible. Their ground-rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception."
Like fish in water, we’re blind to how the technological environment shapes our behavior. The invisible environment we inhabit falls beneath the threshold of perception. Everything we do and think is shaped by the technologies we build and implement. When we alter the flow of information through society, we should expect radical transformations in commerce, education, and politics. Right now, these transformations are contributing to anger and anxiety, especially in politics.
By understanding information flows, we gain a measure of control over them. Understanding how shifts in information flow impact society is the first step towards building a better world, so we can make technology work for us, not against us.
📑 Curations
How the Internet Changes the World
David Perell has written the most succinct yet the most comprehensive account of how the world is changing in the era of the Internet. Everyone creating in today's world must be acquainted with the ideas chronicled in this essay.
What the Hell is Going On by David Perell
📝 Shorter Reads by Me
In the year 2020, I was acquainted by the media, Live Online Courses. The one where a cohort of a few hundred people take a course together. I attended two of them: Write of Passage by David Perell, and Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. In a short essay, I chronicle my experience of it. While the message of these courses gives you all the systems you need to be a self-learner, the medium itself seems to me as one of the ideal ways of learning we must make the shift to.
(1/3) A certain type of online courses can fix our education
I wrote two essays, one describing my mental model for all of Social Media, and stemming from it another essay, a step-by-step guide, to escape all of social media addiction.
(2/3) A bird-eye view of all Social Media
(3/3) How to Escape Social Media Addiction
📀 Art Appreciation
"What would my biggest fan look-like?"
It is through this lens that Friedemann Findeisen begins to understand what sets the band Twenty One Pilots apart. They exemplify how a melody can constantly surprise you.
As we learn the techniques of Information Theory and the philosophies of Mediums, we can slowly start to design products that mod our consciousness and our lives for the better. I like to joke that my greatest ambition is to create a medium like a Guitar that fuels human creativity for generations. And it is designing products like these, one where the design have a direct impact on user output based on how they're designed (like Social Media), are the ones that excites me the most.
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Talk Soon,
Abhishek.