The Glocal Citizen

Medium October 8, 2006

Knowledge is all about the Medium.

* medium.- a means or instrumentality for storing or communicating information

One human being alone, isolated from anyone else, can only learn by his own observation of the world, and this knowledge remains locked inside his mind.

Two contemporary human beings enrich their learning process by sharing their points of view. The medium starts to appear in this communicating process: they use their voices with an agreed code or language.

This integrated observation is now coded. Things observed have names.

We human beings are temporal. We die. That’s why we feel impelled to leave behind a record of our existence and our observations, our knowledge. The medium appears again in this recording process: stones, bricks, scrolls carved or written with the code that represents someone’s knowledge.

The first observers’ descendants don’t start from zero. They inherit the language, they inherit the records left behind, they inherit the knowledge. Their own observation is influenced by previous records, and, at the same time, they enrich the records with their own observation.

As the records start growing, science, philosophy, literature are born. Culture, history and civilization are possible thanks to this immortalized knowledge that keeps growing with each generation that passes by.

Spoken languages and written alphabets diversify. Records multiply. Systematic knowledge like science is kept on physical records accessed just by a few, and practical “life” knowledge is passed down from one generation to another through oral tradition.

Medium has had three milestones throughout human history:

- The printing press: movable types allowed to generate massive copies of a single record. More people had access to one record, and one person had access to more records.

- Mass media: waves allowed to transmit a single message or record to a massive auditorium. In the peak of mass media, television has displaced family and school as the first cultural agent in human formation. It also has favoured the displacement of actual knowledge by a huge amount of isolated details, words and images.

- Internet: bits & bytes allowed to interconnect a massive amount of records among themselves and connect this global network with a massive amount of persons/users. The users are also subjects of interconnection, and generate records for the network.

The supremacy of television has its roots on the presentation. An image record is better than a written description record, and a video record is better than a static image one. The weakness of television is its “unidirectionality”. The receiver can’t choose the content. This weakness exists because of the physical channel: air propagation or one-way cable/satellite transmission.

Internet is displacing unidirectional TV because of the power of its physical channel and the diversity of its presentation: everything can be coded into 1′s and 0′s (text, pictures, sound recordings, video), “uploaded” or “downloaded” though the world wide network, and “hyperlinked” with any other element in the network.

So… a broad horizon is opening for medium. We are getting to the point in which every piece of information will be accessible for everyone who’s able to plug himself into the global network.