ITT we discuss Marshall McLuhan’s theories on media as they pertain to eom.dev. This thread is for discussing media theory. A separate thread exists for sharing one’s own self-hosted network.
Background
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a philosopher whose work was foundational to the field of media theory. A contemporary of Andy Warhol, he is known, among other things, for having coined the phrase, “the medium is the message”. In short, he argued that the difference between reading a letter and reading an email is more significant than anything either message may contain. The content of the letter or email may be mundane, but the medium on which it traveled can tell us something about the state of the world at that time.
This Medium
In the most immediate sense, the medium here is Discourse, a free and open-source forum service. Digging a bit deeper, our medium is the HTTP protocol, or, if you’re adventurous, SMTP (hopefully using encryption with HTTPS or SMTP over TLS, to be specific). Deeper still, this Discourse server is hosted on a Kubernetes cluster on a Dell PowerEdge T640 in my apartment. We are also using single sign-on (typically through Google) for authentication of identity.
The Message
Much of the content I have shared thus far has been focused on showing how this platform was created and how others may do so themselves. Having done this myself, I can say that I “own” the medium. The point, though, is that you can too. Anyone with a Raspberry Pi can host a website. Using federated protocols on self-hosted services with trusted third-parties as identity providers, we can create a network of networks run by communities and individuals rather than corporations and institutions. I intend to host discussions on a wide variety of topics on this website; however, the self-hosted and independent nature of the platform is, at least according to Marshall McLuhan, far more interesting.