Interesting points, Noah. I think a lot about how our current media substitute for older ones or expand upon them. And I agree that online writing (including blogs, social nets, e-mail) often stand in for conversation rather than for Writing. In a way, we're getting back to the written conversations of paper letters, except without the paper.

As for what to talk about in Montana, here's an idea: you could walk through the aspects of your personal and professional life that would be unaffected if you relocated to Montana. In other words, which parts of your online persona could you continue seamlessly, without even mentioning or acknowledging your physical location, if you moved from NYC to Missoula?

One more thing on hypertextuality in print: this idea always brings to mind the footnotes in David Foster Wallace's writing.

Just one small link on the boards article you wrote. Your personal to mass comment might be given some more steam with the asymmetric follow post over here http://tinyurl.com/63gbwj

[apologies for cross-posting, but I just realized that since I refer to Adam, who comments here and not on TBG.com (hi Adam), my comment should be posted here.]

referring to online communication as talking and speech to a large audience as writing, as Adam illustriously does in his comment to your earlier McLuhan post, begs the question of how to define a medium: according to our experience of it, or according to our traditional categories (text, image, etc.)? if we define it according to experience, then real-time multimedia communication becomes talking, and non-real-time/one-to-many communication becomes writing. but if we stick to traditional categories, well, talking stays talking, and writing stays writing. of course, instead of choosing one or the other, these two possibilities can coexist in a 2-by-2 matrix. or a Venn diagram. not sure if I'm making myself clear, maybe I'll have to say it instead of write it...mmm, or something ;)

anyways, your back-and-forth email idea is essentially what Facebook's Wall-to-Wall is all about: performing conversations. hence Seesmic. I used to wanna do this on my blog and call it diablogging (dialog + blog = diablog). if that term is at all useful to you, steal it!

and actually, since the juiciest stuff emerges in the interaction, in the relationships, I've wanted to be able to vote for diablogs. eg I woulda voted for a diablog between Kevin Kelly and Ken Wilber way before they finally got together and had a mutually-enlightening conversation. and this goes beyond conversation: imagine being able to vote for Tortoise and Bjork play a concert together.

Adam concludes his comment with the quote that "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." this is the basic premise of the field of Science, Technology, and Society, perhaps most explicitly articulated by Sheila Jasanoff's notion of coproduction (essentially co-evolution but between people and technology, at the scale of individuals and societies), which you may benefit from checking out in preparation for your lecture in Montana.

...sorry friend, you said to talk about whatever we wanted...

did you notice that your last three posts on this blog are titled with a gerund + a/the + a noun?

Hey Noah -- we met at likemind a few weeks ago. Thanks for the reco on the McLuhan comics. (!)

Here's something I've been thinking about a lot lately: relevance as the currency of the internet.

+ Relevance has been posited as the primary factor in all communication (for a dense but fascinating linguistic study, check out http://tinyurl.com/cqwhaw)

+ Quantifying relevance seems like the major information challenge of our time.

- Google is a relevance engine (using links as votes).

- Amazon and other sites use ratings to establish relevance.

- Brand names -- both corporate and those of your friends, family, etc. -- are "familiar" and therefore usually relevant.

+ So brands, links, tags, clicks, keywords, and ratings can all be thought of as units of relevance.

+ In the old media model, relevance was bought and paid for -- there was little in the way of competition when only a few channels and publications existed. As the amount of content on the web proliferates (not to mention other interfaces, like your cable box, phone, etc.), what new mechanisms will arise to separate the wheat from the chaff?

+ How is relevance defined, anyway? With respect to a goal? To a person? To a culture?

When i read this post, for some reason the thing that crossed my mind was a Plato’s Phaedrus, which is always the first thing that media students are given to read. There’s a good point there about relationship between speaking and writing, and it obviously stuck with me for so long.

It goes like this [and it is basically a rant against a new medium at the time: writing. we seem to always be ranting against some medium or another...]: “Writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.”

Well, now, this is funny. It goes directly against the speaking/writing relationship that’s on the web. Words are alive literally [as hyperlinks] and figuratively [as immediate interaction].

But then, there is this too: while it may be true, as you note here, that “the speed of new media brings us closer to auditory traditions of communication” and that “speed removes some of the levels of mediation”, look what at the same time happens to auditory communication: it becomes more mediated in order to be more immediate. Here, the speed adds levels of mediation, in that we can communicate auditory more and faster because we have tools that help us not to rely only on our own memory & senses [e.g. Keynote presentation, notes, reminders & calendars in our phones, and always available internet if we need “to look something up” while we talk]

So I find interesting this double-bind: there’s immediacy of text and mediation of speaking. Am curious to see if/when the two may become so close they become indistinguishable.

a side thought: wondering if the new immediacy creates some new obstacles to communication [e.g. hyperlinks increase interactivity but take us away from the “flow”; immediate textual exchange does bring new information, but does it increase understanding, etc]

p.s. if you are thinking about this, you have probably already seen the book "remediation" [it's not super-new, but talks a lot about these exact stuff].

Would love to hear more about your talk in MT, Noah.