The Medium is the Message
Keeping sight of what is really going on
Meaning is often overlooked or misinterpreted because we humans take information at face value and fail to consider broader implications.
Marshall McLuhan’s concept, The Medium is the Message, is informative. It asks us to consider how what we develop then, in turn, shapes us.
The industrial age gave us the process of mass production which increased specialization across society as a whole. Efficiency and productivity become important factors to growth as we adopted ‘modern’ processes. Then the subsequent shift to digitization further fragmented this societal shift as quantum-type sciences and technology caused us to focus on increasingly smaller and detailed developments. Slowly but surely, our evolutionary developments have resulted in a siloed society where we now rely on experts to inform us in every field.
Not only have we been oblivious of this collective shift, we have also been blind to how it has impacted us. We have lost sight of the big picture plus we can no longer see, and possibly even deny, the interrelationships across our silos.
Asset class investing
What if I told you that by seeing big picture interconnectedness someone with no experience can be more effective as an investor than the most experienced specialist in their area of expertise, or spectrum of sector specialists? Fixed Income; Equities (small-cap; large-cap); Emerging Markets; Commodities …
This, in essence, is what a Chief Investment Officer or an Investment Committee should be doing, but they don’t. They have already been indoctrinated into siloed thinking via academic specialization followed by years of on-the-job experience.
Let me show you.
