Sometimes the Message gets lost in the Medium

Posted on 8th December 2009 by Gary
In the mid 1960′s Marshall McLuhan coined the famous phrase that the medium is the message. Due to the minor detail of the Internet not actually being properly invented in the mid 1960′s, he didn’t take into account instant messenger tools such as Yahoo! Messenger which can sometimes lead to baffling conversations such as the one I’ve reproduced below.

The name, company and country have been anonymised to protect the innocent but otherwise, this is a faithful reproduction, spelling and grammar included, of a Messenger conversation I had on my BlackBerry last night.

Anonymous: hi gary this is (anonymous) from (hidden) in (somewhere) – im trying to set up a meetign with you on friday but yor calendar is all blocked out – can you unblock it so i can set up the meeting please?

Gary: Hi (anonymous), the reason Friday is blocked out is because I’m out of the office all day at a conference.

Anonymous: i didnt know that – can you update yor schedule to show that yor not around?

Gary: Err, I have; that’s why the day is totally blocked out.

Anonymous: oh if id known that i wouldnt have tryed to set a meeting up. thx

Photo credit: 131j on Flickr

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary

Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.

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