"The plug on the cover of SPLJ from Daniel Pink states that David's new magnum opus is "in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan..." McLuhan is one of those authors, like de Touqueville, that everyone quotes but no one reads -- and perhaps with Weinberger around, people won't have to.
McLuhan's most similar work is, I suppose, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which shares a structural relationship to SPLJ. McLuhan names most chapters after various disruptive media, like TV, and radio, (and some other less obvious media, like money and roads), concluding with automation, the chapter where he anticipates the web. In his most famous quote, he writes "Our specialist and fragmented civilization is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanical bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village."
SPLJ echoes McLuhan, from the other side of the threshold. McLuhan was writing in the '60s, in the midst of the upheaval caused by TV and rock&roll, and only anticipating the future 'global computer automation' that SPLJ deals with. McLuhan is like Moses, who came to the river Jordan, but could not cross over. David is one of us, living in this new millennium, and approaching the 'new world of the global village' as a villager, with an intensely personal voice. McLuhan was not from the village, he was a visionary of another epoch of human history, and sounds tinny and strident, like a cheap AM radio, rambling in oracular prose from an almost Olympian, etheric, macroeconomic perspective.
Weinberger is nothing like McLuhan, except in subject, and his sense of the inexorable inevitability of us being changed by the tools we use. His tone is conversational, while McLuhan exhorts from the pulpit; he illuminates from personal example (his experiences as Everyman, his book reading club, his sensibilities about other individuals making individual choices through the web), while McLuhan paints the sweep of human history in broad strokes with a big brush, hardly ever getting into the thoughts of real people. McLuhan is -- let's face it -- difficult reading, but Weinberger is engaging, funny, and touching: a good read. Weinberger is Spaulding Grey to McLuhan's William Blake.
But even such disparate approaches can converge, as the two come independently closer to the key impacts of a medium like the web, which certainly belongs to the club of potently revolutionary communication media, like the telephone and telegraph, and perhaps in the inner circle, like printing or phonetic writing.
McLuhan presaged the world in which we live, and in the final chapter of UM:EM he sets the stage for the moral issues that Weinberger considers: "It is a principle aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electric network, but it constitutes a single, unified field of experience. " McLuhan intuits the impact of the the web, in 1964. And, even more in tune with Weinberger, he writes "We are suddenly threatened with a liberation that taxes our inner resources of self-employment and imaginative participation in society. This would seen to be a fate that calls men to the role of artist in society. [...] Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as never before -- but also involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience."
Weinberger is a man of our time, in our terms, a digital citizen, while McLuhan pointed the way into a cloudy, unknowable future like a lodestone.
There is another way that Weinberger is likely to parallel the history of McLuhan, and that is his influence both on popular culture and business planning. Weinberger's axe grinding in The Cluetrain Manifesto -- along with his co-authors -- has shaken up the mindset in the board rooms of many corporations. There is little doubt that SPLJ will have a similar, although more measured, impact on businesses approach to marketing to the new wired world.
McLuhan suggested the world would radically change as a result of a new disruptive medium, suggested the form that the change would take on society, and pronounced that this brave new world would be better than the old. Weinberger is living in the world being changed, and suggesting to us -- as individuals -- that we are each of us better off: more free, more engaged, and more likely to deeply understand ourselves and the world that forms us.
Actually, Weinberger goes further. We are better, not just better off, because of our participation in the web society. McLuhan was interested in comparing the society of his time with the society to come, and declared it would be better, but Weinberger makes it personal, because he knows that it is only through personal involvement, one interaction at a time, that we rachet up the connectivity that the web offers. It is not an invisible hand that is typing this blog review, but yours truly, investing my time and self -- sharing and interacting with the village that I call home. Weinberger understands that viscerally, because he is a denizen of my neighborhood, but McLuhan is a foreigner, a man out of time.
Perhaps we will only read McLuhan now for historical purposes, not for guidance. We can look to Weinberger for that."
