Marshall was right

A recent article in the New York Times suggests that members are becoming increasingly disenchanted with Facebook:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

At the same time, we’ve seen an explosion in the use of (and talk about) Twitter–not least because of its role in political events in Iran over the summer.

Soon, no doubt, people will become disenchanted with Twitter and some new Internet tool will be the next big thing. E-mail was cool once; now, not so much. Then instant messaging. Then blogging. Then texting.

For fans of Marshall McLuhan, this is anything but surprising. As I point out in How Computer Games Help Children Learn:

Media scholar Marshall McLuhan once said that “content” is like a juicy piece of meat that a burglar uses to lull a guard dog to sleep. What he meant is that the things we do with a new technology, such as the printing press or television, are less important than the fact that we are using the technology at all. Reading and writing change us in ways more profound than the content of any single book. Television’s power is its ability to bring the world to our living rooms—and it doesn’t matter, in the end, which part of the world pays us a visit, because whoever comes to call makes the world seem like a smaller place. New technologies change the speed and kind of information we exchange and thus change the way we interact with each other and understand the world.

The Internet is about connectivity: about exchanging information. Most of us don’t care about the technical details of how that is done, using IP addresses and packet switching. We think we care about the specifics of the software we use, such as Twitter or Facebook. And yes, getting the details right matters. The properties of a tool shape the way it is used and the impact it has.

But in the end the details of any specific Internet tool may matter less than the interconnectivity itself. Blog, message, or mail: at some point arguing about the differences is just tweeting in the wind.