THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore

Marshall McLuhan was a cultural icon of the 1960s.
His impeccable vision of what was to come/what is today, is uncanny.
Dozens of universities awarded McLuhan honorary degrees and he secured a Schweitzer Chair in the humanities at Fordham University. NBC aired ‘This Is Marshall McLuhan’ in March of 1967.
The Medium Is The Massage is McLuhan’s  quirky assessment of twentieth century communication, politics and philosophy; augmented by Quentin Fiore’s frenzied photographic surrealism.  

McLuhan chanted:
“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
“The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.”
“Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.”

He’s enlightening, alarming and, above all, futuristic.
From the book:
-    The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear – hearing was believing. The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the natural world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear.
-    Everyone is in the best seat.
Everything we do is music.
Theater takes place all the time, where everyone is.
-    At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.
-    Real, total war has become an information war. Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with the old technologies.
The latest technologies have rendered war meaningless.
The hydrogen bomb is history’s exclamation point.
It ends an age-long sentence of manifest violence!

 
Six Pixels of Separation

Author: Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel states, "Everyone is connected. It's time to connect your business to everyone."
I suggest that it's time for you to connect with Joel's informed, mentoring, strategic direction.
The book flows; the style is clean, and, most importantly, the takeaways will leverage your influence immediately.
The new media is no longer nascent. It's developed and it's the prevailing power. Use it. Use it intelligently and obliquely or lose momentum...or worse.

A sampling of Mitch Joel's connective acumen

• It is fundamental reality that most successful business flourish because they are operating in a community that is flourishing. You can't have a strong business without a strong community. 
• How you are positioning how people see you, and how you speak back to them is going to be the global validation for your growth. 
• Digital marketing is about being slow. Real tangible results take time. It takes time to build your content, find your voice, develop a community, and earn trust and respect. 
• How different would your business look if there were thousands of brand evangelists on line talking about you? 
• Tactics don't win anything - strategy does.                                                                             You need to have an amazing website.                                                                                   Having the prettiest website is not a goal - having the most functional one, with great creative flair, is.
• The challenge is to create a face based initiative that truly adds value and gets people's attention.                                                                                                                         What expertise and knowledge do we have, and how can we best share this with our consumers? 
• Viral marketing is the force that takes hold when people pass around something that is very cool. 

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell has offered us his singular look at the people we surround ourselves with and the effect they have on ourselves.
The book lays insight into the careers of the gifted, emphasizing the major role that preparation plays, and overriding the assumption that innate talent is the primary key to success.
Gladwell spins a provoking take on all his subject matter, and I’m a fan.

From the book:

• These are stories about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it; and who happened to come of age at a time when the extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society.
• Then the world changed and he was ready. He didn’t triumph over adversity….instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.
• If they do not outsmart you they will outwork you, and if they can’t outwork you they will win through sheer intimidation.
• Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.

Author: Jeff Jarvis Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers

Jeff Jarvis offers an insightful view into the world of Google, the fastest growing company in history. WWGD explores the infinite possibilities that Web 2.0 provides to the networked world, and Jarvis guides us through Google ‘think,’ Google rules, and the radically unique aspects of the Google platform.

I heartily recommend the book. Jarvis’s narrative is crisp, inviting and convincing. Regardless of the size or nature of your business, you have to grasp the vast influence that Web 2.0 represents and the effect it has on your future.

Selections from the author's work

• The mass market is dead, replaced by the mass of Niches.
• A platform enables. It helps others build value. Any company can be a platform. In the economy we are in now, if you are not a platform you'll be commoditized.
• First draw your company with all its relationships: customers, suppliers, marketers, competitors. Now draw a network from your customers’ perspective and see where you fit in. Next draw your personal network inside and outside your company and industry. Draw your own company not as a boxy organizational chart but as a network with its many connections. Note where value is exchanged and captured. Now examine how each connection can be more valuable for everyone. Put yourself in a cloud of connections that lights up each time a link is made, so the entire cloud keeps getting bigger, denser, and brighter and more valuable. Then your world starts to look like Google's.
• You don't start communities. Communities already exist. They are already doing what they want to do. The question you should ask is how you can help them to do that better.
• If you don't open up, you can't collaborate. Collaboration with customers is the highest and most rewarding form of interactivity, for that is when the public tells you what they want in a product before you've made it.
• Once you decide what business you're really in, once you settle on your strategy, once you figure out how to execute it in the new architecture and realities of the Google age, once you cast a new relationship with your world, once you absorb new ethics of this new era into your company's culture, once you make innovation a keystone of that culture, then there's one more important thing to do, another vital lesson to learn from Google: Simplify.
• Our fixation should not be on our clients. It should be on the people our clients want to engage, sell, and interact with. We should be the champions of those people.