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Defamiliarization: What the Medium Means for the Message
Meeting is an ambiguous term, used to describe a variety of events and interactions. But, if we reduce meetings to their essence, there are three consistent components: a group of people (however small or large, whether staff, volunteers, colleagues or clients), a goal of sharing information (however little or much, whether trivial or significant), and the medium.
Even those who don’t know who Marshall McLuhan is have doubtless heard his proclamation, “The medium is the message.” Although this idea was first posited in 1964 in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, the passing of time has only served to bolster his premise as the means of communication proliferate. The same message feels different and elicits different responses if it’s conveyed in person, over the phone, or in an e-mail.
What’s more, the more alien the medium, the more it demands our attention. The phone and even e-mail are so familiar that we hardly think twice before dialing or hitting send. But, for most of us, Web conferencing is new, and we approach it with some trepidation and a certain self-consciousness.
The novelty of Web conferencing as a medium defamiliarizes the act of meeting with others--but that will not always be the case. The nature of knowledge is such that what is new and unfamiliar becomes commonplace and familiar: A stranger becomes a friend; a new word becomes part of our vocabulary.
What all this means is that we have a transitory opportunity; before Web conferencing becomes as familiar as the phone or e-mail, we should take advantage of this moment of defamiliarization to refamiliarize ourselves with what makes for good meetings. The defamiliarization that Web conferencing causes can help us not only learn something from meeting but also learn something about meeting.
We often take for granted what a meeting is and how it works, but Web conferencing pushes us to think about the nature of meetings--and what makes for good ones--even as we are in the process of meeting. The new medium marks a fundamental return to paying attention to not only what’s said but how it’s said. As we encounter the unfamiliar--virtual whiteboards, voice-over-IP technology, instant messaging--we're jolted into reexamining our message, forced to pay more attention to detail than we do in other, well-known settings.
While for some this may be a reason to eschew new technology, those that embrace it will learn from that attention to form. While we may not tend to think of the average meeting or presentation as a learning event, that is in fact what a meeting is--or what a good one should be. We are uniquely positioned, if we choose, to learn more about how we meet, share information, and learn and how to do it more effectively.
This Sophist looks at Web conferencing, with an eye to the form’s ability to make us rethink simple communication strategies and modify them in ways that best reflect the message. “Meeting in the Virtual World: A Look at the Benefits of Web Conferencing” provides an introduction to Web conferencing and discusses its benefits as a “layered” form of communication, combining the visual, the vocal, the aural, and the participatory.
“Meeting the Challenge: A Profile of the Leader to Leader Institute’s Online Workshop” details one organization’s experience with online, synchronous training, delivered using Web conferencing software, which offers its own idiosyncratic benefits and pitfalls.
We would also like to mention that, in reexamining our own medium, we’ve decided The Sophist will become a quarterly newsletter (the next one due out at the end of April), with brief updates between issues.
We hope you enjoy this issue--and don’t forget to pause along the way to enjoy the medium as well as the message.
The Editors
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