In ancient times there was a revolutionary television show called Laugh In.  Unlike many of the variety shows of the era, it followed no real formula.  Each week we had to tune in. Yes, in those days there were no DVRs or “encore” presentations (we called them reruns ).  Being there for the event would provide us with the catch phrase of the week (today they might be referred to as tweets) “sock it to me”, “here comes da judge”, “veerrrry eeenteresting”.   A wall of doors(as opposed to windows) would open and close with individuals delivering alternating straight and punch lines.  “That’s the way clari nets”, “That’s the way the o boes” then Goldie Hawn would say something like  “That’s the way the drums”.   Kind of a 3rd tier Celebrity Facebook.  The show even did a news of the future sketch, hysterically stating that 20 years from now in 1988 “President Ronald Reagan will…” but they couldn’t even complete the joke they were laughing so hard.

Anyway,  one of the catch phrases that stuck with me was “Marshall McLuahan what are you doin?”.   I didn’t know much about this guy at the time.  It turns out Professor McLuhan was a Canadian Communications theorist who predicted the rise of the world wide web and coined the phrase “the Medium is the Message” which later became a book called “The Medium is the Massage”.  McLuhan theorized that the way content was delivered would eventually be more important  the content itself.  This was all very confusing to those of us living in the 60s, programming computers with punched cards and using CB Radios for wireless communications. 

Yet here we are 40+ years later with 4 cell phones for every man woman and child in the US.  AND we don’t use them for making phone calls, we are texting, surfing the web, listening to music, watching movies on 2 inch screens, recording and posting images, even scanning bar codes.  Our televisions are crammed with 100s if not thousands of channels.  There is now so much “content” out there, we must ignore the vast majority of it, lest we go mad.  Instead we focus on being in constant communication, getting the latest buzz,  and then as McLuhan predicted, we seem to forget about it because our digital media is constantly massaging us with new messages.

In the days of Laugh In, messages were updated weekly and they took the summers off.  Our brains had time to review and contemplate.  Little did we know that Marshall McLuhan was actually viewin (the future).  But,I guess that’s the way the P Sees, that’s the way the Eye phones, thats the way the medi(a)Ums.