+1 for “programming the environment” For many years, I’ve referred to Yale community psychologist Seymour Sarason’s phrase for the programming of the environment: “Creation of setting” in which a community can grow and thrive. I now prefer “venue” to “setting” when talking about site or system, such as VRM, as “venue” denotes the complex set of personal and social expectations that shape an online service, which is based on a collection of agreements explicit and implicit. Mitch Ratcliffe – ratcliffeblog.com –
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253-229-1948 From: Tom Crowl [mailto:
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Sent: Wednesday, October 8, 2014 2:15 PM
To: Doc Searls
Cc: ProjectVRM list
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] McLuhan, as always, was waaaay ahead of his time +1 Re: "How shall the new environment be programmed..." That's really it... and the realization that we're talking about an environment, a landscape must always be kept in mind. It not just a collection of businesses or some huge mall.
On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Doc Searls <
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> wrote: > I have here before me....Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions --the patterns of mechanistic technologies--are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank-- that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early "mistakes." We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change?
Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore, The Medium is The Massage. 1967
Actually, we didn't reach that point for at least another 47 years. And maybe we're still not there.
Doc
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