A Change of Pace

I've never understood what Marshall Mcluhan meant when he said "the medium is the message". I've asked a lot of people. I asked the Quebecois prof who first introduced me to the term outside of its pop culture context. I once spent a day asking customers at the cafe what it meant, by way of making conversation. I've never gotten a good answer. It's too bad, but I'm beginning to suspect that Mcluhan is an academic, doing something that academics do. He has come up with a good quote, and he not going to weaken it with qualifiers.

I think he meant that the medium is pretty important to the message. Admittedly, that sounds pretty weak.

But it has a pretty significant effect on the videos I'm making. All this week, as I tore around town, trying to catch up on our video pitch for next year's Girls' Project (www.createchangenow.ca/donation/ghana-girls-education-2010) I was struggling to find a way to include a brilliant segment that I'd gotten from one of our sponsored students. She gave a really nice five minute answer to my vaguely-worded question about her family's background. Unforutnately, it didn't cut up well (few pauses, lots of pronouns) and in the end, the quote didn't fit. It was, after all, as long as the entire video was supposed to be.

So I'm thinking about turning this blog into a repository for material like this. Quotes, explanations, etc. that are interesting (at least to me) but don't fit in well with whatever I'm cutting together for Creating Change. I might even try to turn this blog into a subset of the video projects - a sort of special feature, and move the personal stuff (the boring stuff) off someplace else.

That's the idea, anyway. Here's the video in question. Apologies for heavy compression but I'm not sure about the upload capacity of the internet connection here.