#SMOOC Day 4: Read / Write / Make

How do we consume data? At TED@SXSWi, technologist JP Rangaswami muses on our relationship to information, and offers a surprising and sharp insight: we treat it like food.

The founding mother of the blog revolution, Movable Type's Mena Trott, talks about the early days of blogging, when she realized that giving regular people the power to share our lives online is the key to building a friendlier, more connected world.

Mena Trott and her husband Ben founded Six Apart in a spare bedroom after the blogging software they developed grew beyond a hobby. With products Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox, the company has helped lead the "social media" revolution.

America was built by makers -- curious, enthusiastic amateur inventors whose tinkering habit sparked whole new industries. At TED@MotorCity, MAKE magazine publisher Dale Dougherty says we're all makers at heart, and shows cool new tools to tinker with, like Arduinos, affordable 3D printers, even DIY satellites.

This phrase has come to us via quite a tortuous route. Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, 1826

In his brand new book, Return on Influence, business consultant and blogger Mark Schaefer explains why influence is the new currency of the social media age. In this excerpt, Schaefer explain what that means for your brand.

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ are upending the traditional concept of influence. Classical models of power are being flipped around in an internet environment where nobody really knows who is who.

In our dense world of daily communication tsunamis, people yearn to find shortcuts to truth, quick reads on power, and 140-character directives to make their lives easier. The trappings of social proof implied by the number of Twitter followers or Facebook “likes” may be more important signs of accomplishment to many people than a lifetime of real achievements.

The consequences for those who seek online power and influence are vast. If you have a social media account, you are already being judged. Companies with names like Klout, PeerIndex, and Twitter Grader are in the process of scoring millions, eventually billions, of people on their level of influence.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media, a classic discussion of media and their effects on society and the individual. Understanding Media helped transform the 52-year old McLuhan from a somewhat obscure English professor at the University of Toronto, to an academic and media star, and industrial consultant. In recognition of the book's importance, it has been reissued by MIT Press with an introduction by Lewis Lapham of Harper's Magazine [10].

McLuhan understood that computers were a communication medium, but did not discuss them in Understanding Media or subsequently, although he lived until 1980 (footnote 1). Regardless, I found this book fascinating and highly relevant today. My copy is now covered with marginal notes, many speculating on how McLuhan would have seen global computer-mediated communication, the Net.

What would McLuhan have thought of the Net? This column consists of quotes taken from Understanding Media (footnote 2), followed by comments on how they might be applied to the Net. (The number following each quote is the page on which it is found). I would not presume to put words in McLuhan's mouth -- these are thoughts that crossed my mind as I read, my marginal notes.