Press room

What would Marshall McLuhan say if he could see how we communicate today?

What’s happening goes way beyond what McLuhan and other communication theorists could have ever dreamt of. I don’t think anybody could have anticipated what has happened, with such lightning-speed development of information and communication technologies (ICT), which at the moment constitute a three-trillion-dollar world industry. Yes, the world has become a ‘global village’, but even this definition would be too simple for what’s happening. The new term would be ‘the cloud’, based on the possibility of storing your hard drive data on the net. However, this ‘cloud’ is already raising questions about its security and the amount of information you have to provide.

Privacy and the internet appear to be increasingly incompatible, particularly with phenomena such as social networks. Some, like Facebook, are shop windows for oneself. To me, they seem like an enormous virtual Hello! magazine.

People are using these types of networks in different ways. All (and when I say all, I mean all) my students are on Facebook (www.facebook.com), but there are two types of users: some use it as a friendship or organisational resource and limit access to their profiles. Others, however, offer unlimited access. That can have a lot of advantages if you want people to know you. It’s a form of marketing. However, people are often unaware about what they’re putting on it. If you post compromising photos or comments on Facebook, it may even lead to you losing a possible job because, make no mistake, your future boss will look you up on the net. Why wouldn’t they? There are a lot of useful sites where you can look for a job, such as LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) and monster (www.monster.com ), while there are others that will give you those 15 minutes of fame that Warhol talked about. Whatever the case, I always tell my students never to write an e-mail when they’re angry. Because everything you post on the net will stay there and come back and haunt you. “Just between you and me” doesn’t apply on the internet.

You said that ICT is a trillion-dollar industry. However, there’s a great deal of inequality in terms of access to the net and telecommunications quality in different countries. What do you think could be done in Spain to improve them?

What today’s users want is all kinds of information (telephone, photographs, music, video, etc.) at any time, wherever they are and without it costing too much. In Spain, where for years there was a monopoly in telecommunications, now the pieces of this puzzle have become much cheaper as there’s competition and more money in circulation, which is an opportunity to improve access. I believe that competition is the key, although I don’t believe that telephone operators are the main winners in global telecommunications.

Who are then?

For some it’s the Googles of this world, the Microsofts. Perhaps it’s IBM, that’s making a come-back, maybe Cisco (www.cisco.com). These are the type of winners.

One winner, Rupert Murdoch, has announced that he’s going to try and prevent Google from using news from his company, News Corp: it’s the world’s largest media group. Is this move to be believed?

Nobody understands it! He wants to charge money, that’s what he’s complaining about. But he can only do this if he produces information that nobody else is producing and there’s great demand for this. Anyway, I believe that this’ll lead to something much more sophisticated than the ‘you can only view my content if you pay’. It’s much more likely that Murdoch will let us view something simple, like the headlines, for free, because headlines are everywhere. And if he insists on payment for analysis, I feel that maybe certain segments will go online and buy more specialist content, such as The Wall Street Journal in the United States. But why pay if you’re a businessman, particularly in Europe, and you can get the Financial Times for free. What it comes down to is that Murdoch is losing readers.

Do you believe that this type of communications magnate like him is already history?

No, no I don’t. Murdoch is a very intelligent man, who has been extremely successful for many years and now he’s frustrated. He’s angry, just like filmmakers and record companies, because young people are not paying for their products. That’s what’s happening.

And it can’t be stopped, can it?

Yes, it can, but the cost of it would alienate customers, as with record companies, who are suing their customers. And it’s not a good long-term model.

Is there a solution?

The first would be if prices are lowered and the quality is good, it’s easier to pay. For example, the basic songs can be downloaded for free but not the analysis (photos of the group, the lyrics, etc.). It could also be financed through advertising, as on Google, where you’re allowed to browse without paying in exchange for seeing all the ads. Ads that tend to become personalised as the search engines get to know you from your searches. Another idea is subscriptions: in exchange for not having ads, you pay a little extra.

Has information improved since the boom in new technology? Do you not think there’s confusion between information overload and quality of information?

What has changed are the tools to help you find out what your interests are. There are vast amounts of information available and lots of tools to help manipulate it. And this manipulation is becoming increasingly interactive. So much so, that lots of people are addicted to their e-mail, mobile, etc. I myself suffer from this from time to time! What we have to do with information is learn how to control it.

How can we learn to distinguish between useful and useless information?

There are two ways to look at this which contradict each other. The first says that multitasking, doing lots of things at the same time, very common with young people, is damaging. That if they did one thing at a time, instead of five, they would be much more efficient. However, there is another approach which says that people from this generation are already much more efficient. I see it in my students, who are very intelligent young people and much quicker and more up-to-speed than me (in terms of the internet, I’m an old man). In the same length of time it takes me to do one thing, they do several: in class, for example, they listen to a class differently, because if someone uses a name or a concept that they don’t know, they check it online. And if you say something that doesn’t sound right to them, they’ll check the information and, if you’re wrong, they’ll tell you.

But do they know where to go to find that information? Because that would be the key, wouldn’t it?

Well, that’s just it. Some of them know, others don’t. During my time in Barcelona, I met a UOC colleague who is researching this subject and he says that in fact many of them don’t do it all that well.