Imagine that you were one of 300 people with fax machines. Each one of you program your respective machines to carbon copy every fax to all 299 other machines. Then, together, you go about your day diligently reading the faxes that pour in. One or two particularly intriguing faxes generates multiple responses, which means that the magnitude of the fax-based conversation multiplies exponentially.

Then one day you realize that you’ll never have time to get through the pile of unread faxes sitting on your desk, so you dump them into your recycle bin and just read the latest faxes that arrive. But then, as you push the Send button to update your other 299 fax-reading friends, you ask yourself: what is the likelihood that this fax is just bound for the recycling bins of two hundred other people?

Are we still communicating? Or are we just sending faxes?

If the social media experiment was replicated on just about any other platform of technology, it would probably leave us scratching our heads, perplexed.

The fax machine analogy raises a couple interesting points. Firstly: just because technology makes a certain mode of communication feasible, it does automatically guarantee the medium provides any certain, practical degree of usefulness. At some point — while sitting there with a pile of faxes on your lap — you’d invariably ask yourself: “Why am I spending my time reading material that wasn’t even written for anybody in particular?”

The second point is equally intriguing: since the mediums of our knowledge transfer systems have shifted from the “physical” (paper, books, letters, etc) to the “non-physical” (digital, optic) we tend to forget that our physical capacity has not changed pace. If we used Facebook with fax machines it would be a wholly impractical and impossible operation to maintain. But since Facebook happens in an apparently “non-physical” world, it’s physical impracticality is a moot point. Or is it? If we needed fax machines to use Facebook, most of us would likely roll our eyes at the seeming insanity of it all. However, get the very same “status updates” off of ink and paper and make the transfer of the words instantaneous and society heralds the brilliant invention.

Whatever may be, Marshall McLuhan’s words of “mediums” and “messages” seem to be echoing through the decades…