Marshall McLuhan on Football 2.0

I once asked a famous quarterback in American Football, on television I asked him what the effect of the instant replay had been on the game of football, and he said, “we have now to play the game in such a way that the audience can watch the actual process that we’re performing. They’re not interested any longer in just the effect of the play; they want to see the nature of the play. And so they’ve had to open up the play, on the field, to enable the audience to participate more fully in the process of football play. It’s an unexpected effect, and I think it will be an effect that will extend to our educational world, to the classroom.

From ABC Radio National. Sydney, Australia, 27.6.1977.

The Age of Big Data

It appears Google has become the modern microscope.

By Steve Lohr, the New York Times, 2.11.12

To grasp the potential impact of Big Data, look to the microscope, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before — at the cellular level. It was a revolution in measurement.

Data measurement, Professor Brynjolfsson explains, is the modern equivalent of the microscope. Google searches, Facebook posts and Twitter messages, for example, make it possible to measure behavior and sentiment in fine detail and as it happens.