Our “make” for the week was to reflect on which communication medium has had the biggest impact on our world, and I’m sure no one is surprised that I’m jumping on the social media aka the internet bandwagon.
I just finished Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction. An Unnatural History” (2014), which makes a compelling case for humans as the biggest change agents in the Earth’s long history. Check out Al Gore’s review of the book here:
Kolbert’s assessment of anthropogenic climate change is pretty sobering: We are definitely the cause and could be casualties of the sixth extinction. But she also suggests that our evolutionary history, particularly our communicative capacities and restlessness, have been our greatest strengths. I’ve got to think that the metamedium of the internet / “social media” will be an essential transformative tool going forward.
For further thoughts on how to assess change while it is happening, I’m re-posting these thoughts on McLuhan from an earlier New Media Seminar.
History, Animals, and Networked Learning
