I had an interesting Twitter conversation on this topic with Greg Turner. Someone had asked “What are you doing to bring the movement forward?” I thought this was a pompous, fatuous, ridiculous question. Movement. Please.

I said somewhat cynically that social media experts spend their time theorizing and pontificating because it’s easier than quantifying the business benefits of social media. Greg said, “Pontification now helps, three years down the road.”

My response: Is one of us the Marshall McLuhan of 2012?

As a journalism student in the 19X0s (decade deleted, but note previous century implied), I idolized McLuhan. I didn’t have the math skills to be a theoretical physicist, but a theoretical communicator, that worked for me. I remember one day driving on some country back road as my girlfriend read aloud from Understanding Media. We analyzed each sentence carefully, in scholarly fashion, showing due reverence for the man and his insights.

Looking back, McLuhan sounds an awful like the social media pundits of today. In Understanding Media, published in 1964, he wrote:

“Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”

Sounds a bit like the premise of Friedman’s The World is Flat, published over 40 years later. I’m reluctant, however, to compare anyone writing or blogging today with McLuhan, because no one strikes me the same way McLuhan did. That may be because I am older and more cynical, and less willing to take such theoretical discussions seriously. Or maybe it’s still so early there’s a lot of nonsense being spewed.

Ours is a slow moving “industry,” despite the speed of communications we enjoy. I am sure PowerPoint for Dummies and the AP Stylebook currently each outsell all of McLuhan’s books combined. But I have to allow for the possibility that there are at least a couple of people among us who might be the next McLuhans.

Tags: marshall mcluhan, understanding media, social media pundits