In 1996 Microsoft's Bill Gates claimed that 'content is king'. Those who are hot on history will recall that it was around this time that the internet first started to enter the collective consciousness. The mid-1990s was an interesting time. Microsoft dominated the computer software market, and Google wasn't yet conceived (Brin and Page didn't launch Google until September 1998). In 1996, most pre-Google online searching was done using Yahoo! (a company founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994) and I remember using Pegasus e-mail, and browsing the web using Netscape Navigator. Mobile telephones were a lot larger than they are today, and quite expensive to buy and use. When people talked about ‘smart phones’ they were referring to the design and appearance of the device, not its capability. Looking back on that embryonic period of telecommunication, and considering the sophisticated tools and services we now have at our disposal, and can use without a second thought, does the statement made about content by Bill Gates still stand?
The reasoning behind the Gates statement is that content is what drives the web. So for example, if a blog constantly publishes good content, the theory is that people will keep coming back to read more. The medium itself is not as important as the content it holds.
The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan had a somewhat different take on media. His famous statement, in pre-internet times, was that 'the medium is the message' (or indeed the massage). Put simply, McLuhan was more interested in the characteristics of the medium that conveyed the content to the user. In 1996 Richard E. Clark, argued that media and technologies were 'mere vehicles' that delivered content to users in much the same way that delivery vans brought goods. His argument was that all media and technologies are neutral, and that the user imposes their own interpretations upon them. His view was that media do not influence learning any more than the delivery van influences diet. While Clark held the view that media do not influence learning, Robert Kozma countered by arguing that specific media do possess certain characteristics that suit particular types of learning activity. Kozma made the statement: 'If we move from "Do media influence learning?" to "In what ways can we use the capabilities of media to influence learning for particular students, tasks, and situations?" we will both advance the development of our field and contribute to the improvement of teaching and learning.'
In essence, Kozma and McLuhan both believed that context (i.e. the tools, the media), were at least as important as the content they delivered, whilst Clark agreed with Gates that the content was king. Increasingly, in today's digital age, many of us are following Clark’s perspective, focusing on content, without paying much attention to the tools we use to make sense of it. In some ways, this is a natural progression, because tools and technologies are becoming more transparent and easy to use without too much thought. Yet in focusing on the content, as McLuhan warned, we may miss the entire message. Highly digitally literate individuals are able to communicate effectively across several platforms without loss of power or nuance. This is known as 'transliteracy', a sophisticated grasp of the affordances of the media and technologies that is becoming the passport to success for today's digital learner and scholar. Transliteracy goes beyond content, and exploits the power and potential of many different tools and services, giving the user an edge over content, enabling them to connect, communicate, consume, create and collaborate more effectively.
Access to information is one thing. But information should not be confused with knowledge. Knowledge comes about through learning and through the diligent application of information. Anyone who is interested in learning will also be interested in cognition and its relationship to knowledge. A popular recent theory is that cognition does not exclusively occur inside the head, but is also increasingly reliant on tools and other people. This theory represents a distributed form of cognition that is highly resonant in the age of ubiquitous and personal connections. David Jonassen talked about using computers and the internet as 'mind tools' - extensions of our cognitive ability and mental space which have the potential to advance personal learning beyond the constraints of normal boundaries and spaces. This mind tool effect can be observed today in large social networks and across distributed communities of practice, and might be explained through connectivist theory which holds that we now store our knowledge more with our friends than we do in any physical repository.
Yet connecting into a community of practice can work as a double edged sword. Although membership of an online network of interest (or community of practice) brings many benefits and rewards, it also has the potential to swamp individuals with content, because every active community member is generating, sharing and recommending content. The larger the community network, the more content is likely to be made available. This experience has been likened to taking a drink from a fire hydrant. Enter any term into a search engine and you are likely to receive back millions of hits. The veritable tsunami of content that assails us can make us feel as though we are drowning in a sea of information. Content has become a tyrant, and although there are many tools to help us moderate and filter this content, not everyone knows how to use them effectively.
One final thought: The internet is better as a creative space than it is as a repository. This is due in no small part to the gradual evolution of so called Web 2.0 tools and services, the majority of which are richly social and participatory in nature. The capability of social networks to connect people with similar interests from across the globe also promotes the need to create, organise, share and consume content within appropriate contexts. As a society, and within our communities of practice, we need to be able to discern the good content from the bad content.
Next time: .... Context is king
Image from Fotopedia
Content is a tyrant... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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