The Message

Well, I was all set to upload a picture of men in orange jackets working on the tram lines at Haymarket this lunchtime. An image I took at 12:30 this afternoon and which by now could have been seen by people all over the world. In fact it could have been seen across the globe within minutes of it being taken if I had been a bit more organised.
But this is not that picture, as when I was about to blip I spotted a Tweet that was a link to an online newspaper article marking the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Marshall McLuhan. You may ask, who? He was an academic who wrote on the importance of changes in media and their impact on society. We studied him last year on our Photography degree.
Here's something he wrote. "The next medium, whatever it is ? it may be the extension of consciousness ? will include television as its content, not as its environment. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind."
Sound familiar?
Only thing is, it was written in 1962.
Before I was born.
So that's why there's a photo of a laptop (on) and a TV (off).
Here's the link to the article.
Oh, and he even features in a Woody Allen film, but you'll have to look for that on YouTube!