Information as a Landscape

2025-5-7

Information as a landscape

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) may be someone you have heard of.

He's probably best known for his saying "The Medium is the Message", or for his prediction of the Internet as the "Global Village" before it even really existed as a concept at DARPA, which people always go on about being profound.

In fairness, it is, because to see that coming before it even existed is quite a profound thing to do, let alone popularise.

But something along the lines of his many ideas, and more particularly his 1964 book Understanding Media, that I often think about is "information as a landscape".

I loosely alluded to this in the last writing in my metaphor of the personal website as a home, and the social media profile as an apartment, and so I wanted to elaborate it a bit more.

But first we have to understand two things; what is information, and what is a landscape.

Information I would define as:

Data or knowledge which can be communicated or received, and is often structured or meaningful to the receiver, shaping their perception or understanding about something.

And landscape as:

The features of an area, usually physical but sometimes metaphorical, which shapes the experience and spatial context understood about said area to someone experiencing it as a place.

At least, this is how I see it. Maybe it's wrong, but I am going with these definitions.

Anyhow. To combine them.

Information is usually constrained within a medium. It ultimately has to be recorded within something to be 'held' and manifested (i.e: "the medium is the message").

Here it could be said, per McLuhan's ingenious phrase, that the medium is a landscape, because it's a "place" that one interfaces with the media being consumed.

Translated: when you consume information, you visit its "landscape" as you would visit the landscape of a real location, because similarly your mind can understand a spatial context within the bounds of, say, a printed book, or a TV window, or a computer, etc. etc.

With me so far? Hopefully this is making sense.

So back to the metaphor - a personal website is a home, a social media profile is an apartment.

What does this make everywhere else?

In McLuhan's idea of the "Global Village", information becomes so integrated into every aspect of modern society that it forms a compressed, interconnected information space, akin to a shared terrain and landscape.

So here it could be argued the modern Internet is like a parallel world, where the information on it forms cities, residences, workplaces, etc.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, this was very much the metaphor used (the Internet is a series of tubes!), where you as the traverser were an internaut/cybernaut/netizen who was visiting and participating within its ecosystem of information space.

We kind of stopped using this mentality as everything transitioned from what is generally agreed as "Web 2.0", the second stage of the W.W.W. where platforms and services dominate over individual websites, and everything ends up as an endless feed of user generated content with likes and comments and whatnot.

I tend to view Web 2.0 as the point where the original Web/Net becomes "a network within a network", an ecosystem of users and interactions built on top of the already existing ecosystem and infrastructure.

In this sense, the best comparison is how everything is a service rather than a place. You probably use Google to find a website, and so you explore Google's information landscape rather than that of the whole Internet's.

I'd liken this to a road network. Most places are findable by road. But some places don't get a road built to them, intentionally or not, and this limits the total area of the world that you can get to.

This would probably make something like AI search akin to a metro system; even more limited in where it can take you, but it does it even faster, and speed depends on public traffic (if servers are at capacity).

Or perhaps a better example; you go and find someone's Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp profile within the Meta information landscape rather than going to their personal ISP-hosted website, and emailing them directly peer-to-peer rather than through a messaging service.

In a sense, the Internet/W.W.W. has become more of a corporate platform complex rather than a wilderness where everything is crazy and personal.

Like any gentrified area, you can still be yourself in it, give or take, but there's CCTV cameras (cookies) logging everything you do. You can get refused entry (banned) by security guards (moderators) who personally don't like you.

Of course, anywhere with a form of law is like this, in fairness.

You could still be banned from hosting your website on your ISP back in the day, like how you always have been able to be arrested by those running the infrastructure of the lands.

But like how in more controlled and enforced environments you have less true freedom, you too have less in Web 2.0, because the landscape is not as much your own; it's the platform's.

So you could say the social media profile is like an apartment in a gentrified city area.

It is fairly clean (unless it's enshittified), pretty easy and safe to live in if you follow the rules, and lots of people are around in the scene. There's endless entertainments offered. There's always something going down. You could even say there's a kind of gang rivalry/warfare between cities/neighbourhoods/communities (e.g. 4chan users vs Tumblr users).

Yet, if anything goes wrong, you're at the mercy of the administrator and building owner/local government body. Sometimes they're somewhat benevolent, like Elon, other times more controlling and weak, like Zuck.

In this scenario, it probably makes personal website like a house in the suburbs/outskirts, or perhaps the countryside.

Fewer people are around. It's mostly quiet. Sometimes there's a visitor or two. It's mostly your own. You pay more for this privilege. If the powers that be truly dislike you, they can take it by force, but you're more responsible for maintenance and how it's used.

Is the information landscape starting to make sense now?

You could even take this further and make the argument that people who do web/UX design are akin to the urban planners/architects of information within cyberspace.

Maybe gestalt principles are the equivalent to information feng-shui.

In the same way, the world "feels smaller" than it once did because we tend to reside in spaces akin to platforms (countries, cities, towns, all with services we rely on for convenience) rather than more primally in the "vastness of uncharted nature" (the Wild West of self-hosted personal websites, where you are responsible entirely for your sovereign territory).

And this is rightfully so. Life is easier when you don't need to defend, don't need to tinker and maintain. Most people don't care enough or don't desire doing it, because people like the path of least resistance.

But the price paid for this convenience is that the information landscape is a lot more limited now.

People stay in their platform cities that they're familiar with.

If they do go anywhere, they only go by Google's roads to only the other big platform cities and towns, maybe the odd house of someone they know who has a residence in the Internet countryside like me.

And even worse, people now opt to solely take the ChatGPT Metro or Perplexity Bus only take you to information locales where these services deem worthy of being accessed based on morality and trustworthiness. You get even less options.

It paints quite an apt picture of the current state of the information landscape.

I guess the next stage of this is that AI will, and arguably already has, flood the platforms like a zombie disease, where the information landscape becomes so polluted with infohazards and falsities, that like in a declining town, it becomes a dead zone which no longer booms because it's now a low-trust environment that doesn't accomplish its original social contract anymore.

In the case of platforms like Meta where its rulers are so deluded to think that people will prefer AI friends over their real ones, I can see many people taking flight to saner zones of the information landscape, desiring a personal space over one they have no control over and that can easily turn to a rundown dump.

But hey, such is history. Empires and nations and cities rise and fall. The information landscape is no different.

As the Greeks and Romans had their time, so have many localities in information cyberspace like Netscape, MSN, MySpace, Facebook (arguably), or the latest one, Skype.

Everyone’s time eventually comes.

I think like how the West is currently facing another decline, so are the current platforms. Society hangs by a thread in both landscapes, as it always has done. Ours is the decline of Web 2.0. and of platforms as they get enshittified with AI, and corporations overstep their mark with surveillance and privacy violations, with endless scrolling mind traps that push the greatest psychological entrapment of history, all with poor interoperability and harmful casino-like designs so you never leave.

Web 3.0. may save us with its decentralisation, blockchains and cryptographic proofs of work/stake to verify you are human and ensure "truth" in an information landscape of falsedom.

Maybe it won't and things will become even more dystopian, where there's even less of an escape because everything is tied to you, via devices even more integrated into your life (AR glasses, cybernetic implants) to ensure you end up as a hivemind cyborg or prisoner for the Metaverse Matrix living in a physical and digital pod, where you own nothing, yet will manipulated to be happy.

But regardless, it will look completely different as a landscape. It will be another era of information cyberspace, and it’s unfolding as we speak.

It may not be tomorrow, or the next day.

But always bear in mind: who puts your world in formation?

REFERENCES:

[1]

Marshall McLuhan - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

[2]

ARPANET - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

[3]

"The Importance of Writing" - me