Today’s guest post is by Lindsay Bell.

If we could take two of the modern world’s most innovative and forward-thinking minds, stuff them in a blender, and press puree, you wouldn’t only have a bit of a mess on your hands, you would have a fairly good representation of where we sit in today’s insane digital world.

George Orwell got the ball rolling with his satirical yet frighteningly prescient 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Here’s a refresher:

“The Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically names English Socialism, under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thought crimes.” Hmmmmmmm.

Marshall McLuhan brought up the rear – a mere decade or so later – with the idea that our advancing technologies would have a profound affect on our lives, culture, and the way we view our history.

His oft quoted – and oft misunderstood – “the medium is the message” explored how the content of the message itself had less power than the media through which it was conveyed, and how each media had its own biases and language: Oral recitation, TV, radio, stage, comic books, etc.. Social media must have the man spinning in his grave. (more…)