One of the most commonly quoted phrases of the electronic age is author Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message.” The primary focus of his comment was television and the remarkable changes it brought to American society.
Thirty-five years after McLuhan coined that phrase, the relationship between medium and message is tighter than ever before. A perfect example is this week’s firestorm regarding the changes to the Facebook terms of service. The genesis of the controversy, the speed with which it spread around the world, and its resolution all help to underscore not only the ways that media is changing but society itself.
The Little Blog that Could
Remarkably, Facebook announced its changes to the site’s terms barely two weeks ago in a blog posting by Facebook’s corporate counsel for commercial transactions, Suzie White. The announcement attracted relatively little attention in the traditional mainstream media or even the technology press. CIO Today included a brief mention of the changes in a longer article about Facebook, but the change went entirely unremarked by newspapers, radio or television outlets.
That changed this week when the blog Consumerist posted its trenchant analysis of the new Facebook terms: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.” The post was incendiary enough by itself to attract attention, but it was the post-blog fallout that really made a splash. When a handful of legal wonks are grumpy about some fine print, that’s an anecdote; when hundreds of thousands of people join protest groups and threaten to leave Facebook, that’s a story.
And one of the real signs of change was on Wednesday, at the height of the Facebook controversy, when NBC Nightly News invited Consumerist coeditor Ben Popken for a brief interview. “They just basically had a major PR flameout on their hands,” Popken told NBC, “and…