Harper also focuses on his recent successful reelection. He places considerable emphasis on the continuity of his government with words such as: “mandate,” “continue,” “ensure,” and “commitment.”  

Jack Layton, in his response on the same day, placed a considerable emphasis on the global economic crisis. Keywords such as “economy,” “economic,” and “deficits” appear within his speech. Furthermore, these words carry similar weight to the corresponding words used in Harper’s speech. Layton, however, used a greater variety of verbs as compared to Harper. Layton placed emphasis on verbs such as “invest,” “protect,” change,” “take,” “begin,” “get,” et cetera.

Layton’s overall emphasis on families is apparent in this visualization, the word “families” has a prominent position in his speech. Furthermore, “table” can be seen in the visualization, albeit in a relatively small word. When Layton refers to the “table,” he does so as part of the phrase: “putting food on the table.” He is not however, referring directly to the phrase “kitchen table,” a phrase which has permeated his election campaign.

Lastly, Layton appears to place an inordinate emphasis on courtesy, words such as “Mr,” “speaker,” and “Throne” suggest that Layton’s speech is particularly courteous and polite. In fact, his speech addresses the House Speaker no less than seven times, while Harper’s much longer speech addresses the House Speaker only five times.

(Visualization created through the use of http://www.wordle.net/)

Virtual Worlds then, are a medium in and of themselves. Their relation to the Internet is not unlike an automobile’s relation to the highway, which acts merely as a conduit for travel and exploration. The role that the Internet plays, as it relates to Virtual Worlds, is that of infrastructure. It is the means by which users are able to create, manipulate, and share knowledge in an audio-visual environment.  As a relatively new medium, Virtual Worlds have gone largely unnoticed in the larger media landscape, but it would be wise to investigate their intricacies by way of Marshall McLuhan’s Tetradic model.

Marshall McLuhan wrote that: “The content of a new medium is always an older medium.” What he meant by this is that new media must always reflect the content of preceding media. As in the case of radio, which largely made use of theatre, literature, news coverage, and other existing media for its content. The television too, utilized the audio content of radio and the visual content of cinema to create a new experience, and also a new culture. The Internet can be viewed as an amalgamation of all of its preceding media, it combines visual, audio, and print in new and robust combinations. The Virtual World, like the Internet, necessarily combines all preceding forms of media, and therefore takes on the characteristics of each.

Let us look closely at the human functions that McLuhan suggests must necessarily be enhanced by new media, in this case, Virtual Worlds. Virtual Worlds enhance human community and collaboration by offering a new space that is conducive to human networking. Users are able to gather in groups, in residential “islands” where they have (usually) like-minded neighbors. Each island is a world onto itself, with populations of various nationalities and backgrounds.

Virtual Worlds also enhance our sense of an online presence. Even prior to the advent of the Virtual World, each individual who regularly used various aspects of the internet, had consciously or unconsciously, crafted an online persona, an online presence. Between the various logins at message boards, chat-rooms and other online communities and the internet handles that individuals became associated with there arose a unified personal representation of that individual in cyberspace. Virtual Worlds are an extension and enhancement of this online persona in that they render with it the concrete physical features of sex and ethnicity. Virtual Worlds gather the disparate elements of an ‘ online persona, the logins and internet handles, they give them the option of choosing a name, a physically representative avatar and a geographically-based location for that avatar (within the virtual world).

This leads me to the next point on McLuhan’s tetrad, that of retrieval. McLuhan believed that each new medium retrieves and revives something from human history that may have been lost or confused. As an example, the radio may be thought of as a medium that revived the ancient onus on orality and the spoken word. Virtual Worlds act in a similar sense, they retrieve conversation in the form of in-world voice communication, something that is primarily lacking in the World Wide Web. Likewise, they retrieve the age-old concept of tribalism, the act of belonging to a small community with shared interests and goals. In today’s information vortex it is refreshing to find a space where one is among a small group of like-minded individuals.  Furthermore, acts of communal building are another example of an activity or practice that is slowly disappearing in modern western culture. We no longer build our communities, rarely do we have much control over the environmental conditions within which we must function. In Virtual Worlds, the users and inhabitants of residential islands take a direct approach in the creation of their own environment, it is not forced upon them. Largely, the environments within which individuals decide to operate are a direct reflection of their beliefs, their activities and their community, a practice which has gone out of style in modern society some years ago.

The third point on McLuhan’s triad deals with what a new medium obsolesces. A new medium makes certain preceding media, and more commonly, certain aspects of preceding media obsolete. For example, the Internet has, in many ways, made travel and interpersonal interaction obsolete, in certain circumstances. Whereas before, a flight or other travel arrangement was necessary to meet with prospective business partners, with the telephone we can connect directly via teleconference. As a medium that is predominantly based on communications, Virtual Worlds are threatening towards the Internet’s capabilities for communication, such as: e-mail, chat rooms, bulletin boards, voice chat, video chat, etc. Virtual Worlds are still a nascent media, they have not yet become entrenched in the collective subconscious. Therefore, it would be negligent to suggest that Virtual Worlds have usurped the technologies that power the Internet. However, it is clear that even in this early stage Virtual Worlds are competing with browser-based communications technologies. 

The last point on McLuhan’s Tetradic model is that of Reversal. McLuhan believed that all media, once it is extensively used and abused, has the potential to reverse, or flip. We see evidence of this in the “dark side of the Internet,” the various illegal and immoral offerings of the Internet that are the products of an abused medium. Virtual Worlds are not exempt from this concept, they too have the power to reverse their beneficial characteristics of mass communications and community creation. Virtual Worlds, when pushed to the maximum, may become plagued by harassment (verbal, sexual) and by immorality in much the same way as the Internet. Further, there is the threat that individuals may become so absorbed in their avatar and in their “virtual life” that they neglect their duties and responsibility in the real world. 

In retrospect, the value of the Kent Commission can be seen in the population’s latent attitudes towards media concentration. The free press movement has garnered significant support amongst media-conscious individuals, both in the U.S., and in Canada. In an interview with Adbusters magazine, Noam Chomsky spoke about the problems posed by George Bush’s administration in regards to free press and press reform. He said: “Unless you have organized public opinion, which can be mutually reinforcing and can help develop a critical understanding, everyone is going to be at a loss. It’s you against the Internet and you don’t know what to look for. These problems can’t be solved by technical means. They have to be solved by organizing an educated population” (Adbusters).

Chomsky places the onus on the public, to become organized and to, hopefully, stimulate some level of press reform.

Noam Chomsky has been the voice of dissent within America for several years; but there are other voices that are gathering not only in strength, but also in readership.

Caslon Analytics, an Australian website, tracked some of the hard data on blogging.

Amongst the results:

Blogcount estimates that there are between 2.4 million and 2.9 million active blogs in June 2003.

Technorati claims that it catalogued up to 11.7 million blogs in June 2005.

These numbers are revealing, but also, on some level, misleading. Generally, such statistics include what are called “spam blogs” and other such websites.

However, blogs are posing obvious challenges to traditional media outlets, especially since they often feature news or links to reliable sources alongside their opinion blogs. The appeal of the blogosphere lies predominantly in its interactivity.

The ability to interact with information has been steadily increasing; readers are becoming contributors and commentators instead of merely consumers of information.

Marshall McLuhan , in his 1966 lecture “The Medium is the Massage” said that:

“The strange dynamic or pattern of electric information is to involve the audience increasingly as part of the workforce instead of just tossing things to it as consumer or as entertainment…You do the work.”

The goals of blogging are often focused on consumer independence, in thought and expression. The blogger can, momentarily, disconnect themselves from the traditional media which has become synonymous with phrases such as “cross-channel convergence” and “concentrated ownership.”

Blogs, amongst other Web2.0 applications, have become an excellent example of consumers doing the work. While bloggers may be free from the restrictions of a heavily concentrated media landscape, an important question seems to emerge: are they writing in accordance with journalistic ethics?

MMORPG’s are examples of limited virtual worlds; they’re limited in that their content is created by corporately-backed developers and programmers. There is very little content creation is in the hands of the user. That’s where MMORPG’s fall short in comparison to more open-source Virtual Worlds. They fail to recognize their users’ desires to share in the creative process and also to interact within user-created environments. MMORPG’s have, however, been an important ally for user-driven virtual worlds.
Virtual Worlds such as Active Worlds and Second Life allow users to create, modify, and interact with their virtual surroundings. In Second Life users can interact via typing or voice chat; they’re able to share pictures and video, link directly to websites, and make use of popular services such as Twitter. All of this occurs predominantly through the use of avatars, which can either be whimsical characters or more accurate representations of the user’s real appearance.

Second Life has many of the characteristics of the real world: communities, economy, education, and even warfare. As such, it has become a breeding ground for new ways to model real world occurrences, such as: teaching and learning, drawing parallels between a virtual economic microcosm and real-world economies, models for social organization and, military models for terrorism and war.
Virtual worlds were once relatively obscure gaming environments where players battled for fame and fortune. The battle rages on, except now it is focused on new ideas, revenue models, and virtual archetypes that directly translate into our daily social, economic and political environments.

Recently the Internet has been undergoing a process of Darwinian evolution. However, at its core, is not the survival of the fittest, but rather, survival of the most accessible and integrated. One of the effects of this evolution, apart from creating vast knowledge-communities, is what can only be described as a more automated web. The benefits of this advancement are immediately apparent to anyone who has ever used an RSS feed.

In 1957 Marshall McLuhan wrote:

“As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself.’”

McLuhan’s theories suggest that an automated age promotes an increasingly “do it yourself” culture, one in which participants, through their active involvement, become experts.

In his book “ The Gutenberg Galaxy ,” McLuhan states that all technology is an extension of the human body and the human sensory experience. Just as the wheel is an extension of the foot, and the map is an extension of our visual-spatial perception, Web2.0 environments are also extensions of ourselves. In all of its XML glory Web2.0 is an extension of our “knowledge” hunting-and-gathering abilities. It allows us faster, more automated access to information. Also, our own content can be communicated and indexed with greater speed and automation.

This automation, at first glance, may seem antithetic to the previously mentioned concept of “do it yourself.” However, the automation of the Internet has allowed scores of individuals, who may have lacked the technical ability to code in HTML, to begin engaging in knowledge-sharing via the Internet.

Michael Wesch , assistant-professor at Kansas State University explores this evolution in his video “The Web is Us/ing Us .” He unearths the code structure of the Internet, as an archaeologist might dig for relics and fossils. Wesch explores some of the differences between HTML and XML, primarily XML’s ability to allow the user to focus on content rather than formatting. As a result, information can be easily transferred, indexed and automated.

Wesch’s video further investigates the benefits of Web2.0 by demonstrating the ease with which users can create blogs and begin adding their own content. He also points out that, on average, a blog is born every 30 seconds. With that kind of proliferation, it is no surprise that traditional media outlets view blogging as both a challenge and an opportunity.

Indeed, the “do it yourself” culture of the blog and Web2.0 has pervaded our traditional media outlets: television, radio, as well as the advertising and entrepreneurial sectors are attempting to take part in this evolution. In regards to television news programs, blogs and other viewer-submitted media are often highlighted alongside traditional content, such as in the “iReporters ” segments on CNN. However, how much of this is a gimmicky and vain attempt at infiltrating the lucrative phenomenon of “do it yourself?” How much of it is a sincere commitment to branching out and creating communities of inclusivity? “Do it yourself” culture, by its very nature, should resist being sucked into the vacuum of traditional media. Despite the problematic relationship with traditional media, blogging and Web2.0 are signs of a more integrated, and automated knowledge culture.

photo credit: libraryman