The New Medium is the Message

Marshall McLuhan

The 100th anniversary of master communicator Marshall McLuhan's birth was celebrated July 21, 2011. McLuhan was a leading expert in communication theory, his most famous saying being: "the medium is the message". But what exactly did he mean by that?

All communication requires an environment to contain it - its medium. McLuhan was saying that the specific form of a medium is actually embedded in the message that is being communicated. In doing so, there is a relationship in which the medium itself affects how the message is perceived. That is, the line between the information and the container of that information is blurred.

An example of this is a TV news story about a terrible crime. The message presented in the news story may not be so much about the crime, but more about our negative attitudes towards crime, attitudes that are influenced by the very fact we are viewing in our home the news about this crime. That is, the medium (TV) is transmitting and influencing our perceptions of crime in general. The subtle message is that crime is everywhere, even in your home, on your TV.

McLuhan was a tremendous visionary and forward-thinker because many of his ideas can be applied to modern media and technology. Information technology has changed a great deal since McLuhan's time, but his principles remain relevant.

Comparing old and new technical communication technology and  processes can give us insight into the message of the new medium. The following sections list the major differences:

Documentation Formats
The type of documentation delivered.

• Traditional: paper, PDF, local help files
• Modern: online (websites, discussion groups, help files, blogs)

Managing Content and Form
How the the information itself (words, graphics, diagrams, and so on) and its form (its physical appearance, including formatting) are managed.

• Traditional: a writer manages the information and its formatting simultaneously using a WYSIWYG editor
• Modern: the information is separated from its form using an XML editor; a information developer creates and categorizes the raw data; an information architect designs the visual form the information will take; the same information can be published to different formats (PDF, online help, website, RSS feeds, tablets, smart phones and so on) using different publishing targets

Reviewing and Markup
The process reviewers follow to indicate their changes to a draft.

• Traditional: reviewers mark up paper copies or send emails
• Modern: reviewers mark up an electronic copy; the writer directly incorporates these changes into a working copy; multiple reviewers can review same copy simultaneously and see each other comments; a record of all comments and changes are kept, allowing the writer to revert to any previous version

Documentation Access
The degree to which the source document can be updated by the writer and viewed by the end user.

• Traditional: the document can only be edited on the writer's system and can only be viewed on the end user's system
  
• Modern: the document can be edited anywhere via a secure online server and can be viewed online anywhere

Information Currency
How current the information is; the frequency with which the document can be updated to ensure the end user is viewing the latest version

• Traditional: the end user's version is only as current as the product itself; changes do not appear until the next release
• Modern: the writer can update information at any time; the end user can view the changes online in real time

End User Feedback
How easily end users can comment on the documentation.

• Traditional: writers review the document with the end user in person, a time-consuming and expensive process
• Modern: users can rate and submit comments directly on specific topics via the web; the writer receives an email notification of the comments
  

The message of this new technical communication medium is that information should be free for both its creators and consumers. A writer should be able to access and update their source files anywhere. End users should be able to view the information anywhere, and know that they are viewing the latest version. They should also be able to give immediate feedback on the quality of the information. These are the obvious messages.

The deeper message is that we can all be creators and consumers of information, and that we demand much greater control, and a greater say, in the content and accessibility of this information. Information is power, and we all desire more power over this power. That is the true message.

Finally, this blog is a part of this new medium, and therefore embraces this message. I can access and update it anywhere (and frequently do.) All changes are published immediately. Using the Subscribe to: Posts link at the bottom, you can view these postings in any RSS reader. And you (the end user) are free to comment on these postings.

The medium and the message have become one.

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Renaissance Man

Who amongst us would not strive to be that most self-actualized of persons, master of many fields, an intellectual powerhouse, knowledge warrior and universal genius known as a Renaissance Man.

A Renaissance man (or woman) is not simply a jack (or jill) of-all-trades. It's someone who has an outstanding talents in, and great knowledge of, a wide variety of areas. Leonardo da Vinci is the classic example. He was an exceptional artist, scientist, engineer, inventor, and so much more. He was intensely curious and had a tremendous imagination: the ultimate technical communicator. Using his plans, many of his inventions were reconstructed in modern times and performed well.

Technical communicators are not just technical, and we do far more than communicate. A true technical communicator is a Renaissance communicator, as our talents involve many other professions and fields of knowledge.

Renaissance Communicators are:

• artisans designing, formatting and shaping words and images, as well as sound and motion in instructional videos
• teachers imparting information to others in a manner so subtle and seamless that our students don't even realize they're learning something
• architects designing and building complex informational structures
• physicians healing incomplete, incorrect or inaccurate documentation
• detectives piecing together clues to solve the mystery of the product we document
• translators and interpreters of the meaningless into the meaningful
• magicians turning chaos into order and creating guides out of thin air
• craftspeople building, tweaking, and endlessly tinkering with our data creations
• cartologists of information mapping the big picture of a product or service
• code-breakers decoding incomprehensible gobbledygook into meaningful prose
• archaeologists hunting for buried informational treasures 
  
• ambassadors between those who create products and those who use them
• journalists persistently pushing, prodding and probing our subject matter experts with the tough questions
• soldiers in the war on error and confusion

We are the true multi-taskers, knowledge workers, and service bureaus that willingly absorb the pain of misinformation, disinformation and no information to create informational works of art.

Not only are we Renaissance Men and Women, our profession itself is undergoing a renaissance, as technical communication processes move toward separating form from content.

It's a Renaissance, man.

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The Seven Lively Sins

Quick quiz - can you name the seven deadly sins? And no, Dopey and Grumpy do not count.

The seven deadly sins are:

• wrath
• greed
• gluttony
• pride
• lust
• envy

and (my personal favourite)

• sloth

I would have loved to have been on the committee that chose these sins above all others. ("If you vote for lust, I'll give you pride and sloth.") In any case, the final list is as good as any, and remains quite popular, as popular as the sins themselves, unfortunately.

An easy way to remember these sins is to use a "leggs password". Taking the first letter of each sin and rearranging them, we get LEGGSPW - or "LEGGS PassWord". Be sure to write that down.

The seven sins, one for each day of the week, were well-documented in the 1995 film, Se7en. It is one of the darkest films I've seen, both literally and figuratively. We enter a nightmare world in which an insane serial killer with a God complex murders his victims according to the seven deadly sins. The twist ending is so disturbing that to this day, I still shudder whenever I see a courier truck. (Those of you who've experienced this film will know what I mean.)

On a lighter note, they say when life gives you lemons, to make lemonade. Since I'm not a preacher, I won't attempt to dissuade you from carrying these sins into the world of tech comm. Playing "devil's advocate", these sins, if implemented constructively, can actually make you a better communicator. Rather than being deadly sins, they can be quite lively.

Let's start the sinning...

Greed
The greatest quote about greed is in the film Wall Street, when the ruthless mogul Gordon Gekko makes the following statement: 

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

"Greed for knowledge" - amen to that. Greed for knowledge, information, clarity, consistency and simplicity. If you're not greedy for these things in your work, it will burn in the hell-fire of bad documentation, and that's a real sin.

Pride
We should all take pride in our work, but not be boastful. We have to humbly and sincerely recognize we technical communicators are just like everyone else - only better. For what other species of humanity is as sensitive to words and meaning as we are? We are the patron saints of clarity, simplicity and functionality.

Gluttony
I admit I'm a glutton - not for food, but for information. I devour newspapers, magazines, books, blogs, websites, signs, posters, and even junk mail. I stuff my mind with it until it's bursting. It's alot to digest, but there are lessons to be learned (and great ideas to be stolen) from all of it, so I've no plans to diet.

Lust
When you see a beautifully designed quick start guide, a well-organized manual, a perfectly arranged help system, a clear and simple procedure, this should turn you on. If it doesn't, there's a malfunction in your informational libido, your user manual mojo, and you must see a Doc doctor immediately.

Sloth
Sloth is such a destructive sin that there's really no way it can be useful in communication. Its only value is recognizing it in others. Non-writers and lazy writers who produce bad documents are "slothful". They should anger us into action, empowering us to clean up their messes when called on to do so.

Users can also be slothful, but since they are paying our salaries, we have to be more forgiving. Design your documents so that even the laziest user can get the information they need, quickly, easily, and with minimal effort. They should be able to fly through your document as they lie on their couch, doughnut in one hand and TV remote in the other.

Envy
Envy is the honest way of stating you have a desire for change. To be a great communicator, read the works of great communicators, and ideally meet them. But don't just admire them - envy them. Then become the type of communicator that others will envy.

Wrath
It's easy to pour our wrath onto those who think they can write but cannot; on engineers who create error messages such as Error 43 - Big. You have failed.; on marketers who use strange words and phrases like actualize, customer-centric and out-of-the-box thinking; on reviewers who mark up a 400 page draft with just two words: Needs work.

How simple life would be if we could just release our fury onto these people. However, living in a somewhat civil society, we are precluded from most acts of violence. Instead, let us direct our fury, our anger, our wrath towards the documents themselves. Documents are so much easier to change than people.

So let us take these broken and bruised clumps of information, and with all our might and energy, reshape them into clear and meaningful documents.

Let there be no mercy, as we unleash in full force our technical, communicative, organizational and design skills onto our work.

Let us be...wrath.

And may God have mercy upon the soul of the document that we are about to remake in our image.

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An OS is not O/S

Being a person of many hats, it only made sense to buy one recently - one with a large brim to protect myself from UVA, UVB, and whatever other radioactive letters the sun wishes to hurl at me.

The hat I purchased included a tiny inline document (also known as a "tag") which simply stated O/S, a cryptic acronym indicating One Size. In other words, the hat manufacturer was too lazy and cheap to offer assorted sizes, and decided to fool the customer into thinking that size doesn't matter. The result is that for some the hat is too large, and for others, too small. The solution is to have an average-size head, however these can be difficult to obtain.

In software, the letters OS have a different meaning, of course, as the abbreviation for Operating System. Long gone are the days when there were two main platforms: Windows and Mac. There's Unix and Linux and Android (oh my!), Ubuntu, Blackberry OS, Chrome OS and many others; there's almost as many OS's as there are, well, hats.

The tremendous variety of devices each with their own OS is proof that there's no one-size-fits-all OS. That is, there is no O/S OS. Each user has their own needs and desires. Within each OS, you can customize the look, feel and functionality even further, creating a nearly infinite number of "sizes".

The funny thing is that most users neither know nor care that their devices have a so-called "operating system" - they just want to do stuff, like make calls, find information, or play a game.  The fact is that most devices have some sort of operating system or they wouldn't be able to - operate. Watches (digital and analog), TVs, basic corded phones, washing machines, DVD players, cars - all these things require an operating system. When was the last time you pined for an upgrade for your clothes dryer? We don't care that a toaster has an OS - we just want toast.

So how would we define an operating system? It's not just software. As its most basic level, it is a structured environment that receives input, processes it and creates output. It can also organize and manage the things in that environment. A software OS, for example, must have file management capabilities.

Any document is an OS for information. For example, a user can interact with an online help system by searching it, resizing it, bookmarking certain topics, and if possible, annotating it and submitting feedback on it. The end product is knowledge - the document is the OS allowing this knowledge to be transmitted.

This definition of an OS can be extended as far as your imagination will take you. The gears and pedals on a bicycle are the operating system for that bicycle. They receive input (force from the biker) and transform it into energy and movement (output). Every living thing has an OS - the infinitely complex arrangement of cells, nerves, muscles, bones into a living form, all coded with DNA. Although we recognize each other through our physical appearance, we know each other through our minds and souls. The body, then, is the OS for the soul. When the hard drive of a body crashes, the soul goes with it, at least in this world.

The world is the OS for humanity, our universe the OS for this world, time and space the OS for the universe, and existence itself is the OS for God or whatever force you believe runs the universe.

So to all those wizards who continue to create OS's so magical and subtle that we don't even see them - my hat's off to you.

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A few good elements

The ancient Greeks believed that everything in the world was made up of four basic elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. This concept was so powerful it lasted even through the Renaissance. Interestingly, the first three elements correspond directly to the three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. The fourth element, Fire, corresponds to energy. Given that matter and energy are the two main elements of the universe, the ancient Greeks were not far off in their view of the world.

Aside from the physical aspects of these elements, there is the meta-physical. Earth, being solid, represents stability and tangibility - that which can be touched, seen and known. Water, being liquid, represents change and movement. Air is invisible and therefore less tangible - we cannot see it directly but can see its effects. Air is also the medium required to support Fire, and life itself. Fire is pure energy that can change matter from one state to another. It can thaw ice, converting it to liquid water, then to steam, a gas.

Aspects of these four elements exist in technical communication. Earth is the visible, stable portion of a document - the portion that can be seen and which rarely changes. A printed manual is forever Earth -  never changing until replaced by a newer version.

With more documentation now online, information has shifted in form from Earth to Water - ever flowing, ever changing, and increasingly customized and shaped towards the specific needs of the end user.

Air is the medium through which documentation is delivered. The printed page, the monitor, the smart phone, the tablet - the medium is not the message but is the air in which it lives. Air is also the white space around all words, text and images, allowing the words to breathe. With no medium or no white space, communication would be starved of life.

Fire is the energy that flows through the mind of a technical communicator, allowing them to shape, bend, twist and change the words and images they yield. It is the transformative power that a skilled communication craftsman uses to alter the form and substance of information. For a spectacular of Fire, see the CSS Zen Garden, where stylesheet magicians forge communicative works of art, as swordmakers used to forge metal in fiery furnaces.

Air. Fire. Earth. Water.

Note the words formed by the first letter of each element: AFEW.

All you need is "a few" elements to create a universe of communication.

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