From a helmet cam.

Today is the centenary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth. He’s one of those thinkers who is so famous that everyone thinks they know what he stood for, but I guess that most people, if pressed, can only quote (or misquote) one of his aphorisms — “the medium is the message”, and the phrase “the global village”.

McLuhan lived — and wrote — in an age dominated by broadcast television, but, oddly enough, his thinking seems much more relevant to our current networked media environment.

There’s an awful lot of stuff about him on the Web (and in libraries), but IMHO the best and most insightful commentary is by Tom Wolfe in this terrific 22-minute video.

If you do nothing else today, make a cup of coffee and watch it.

Among its many merits is the insightful way Wolfe dissects the two biggest influences on McLuhan’s thought: the work of Harold Innis; and the ideas he drew from the French mystic Teilhard de Chardin, the guy who coined the term “noosphere”. And if you’re puzzled by what all this has to do with the Net, can I remind you of Eric Raymond’s fascinating essay, “Homesteading the Noosphere”?

Woolfe clarifies one of the great mysteries of McLuhan’s writings: why was he so punctilious in crediting Innis as a source of inspiration, while at the same time being entirely reticent in acknowledging the influence of de Chardin on his thinking? The answer, it seems, lies in the fact that McLuhan was a devout Catholic who taught in a Catholic university; and despite the fact that de Chardin was a Jesuit priest, his belief in evolution meant he was persona non grata with the Vatican; and because he was seen by the secular world as a mystic, he was persona non grata in academia. In this case it looks as though McLuhan took the path of least resistance.

My Observer column on Sunday will also be devoted to McLuhan.

Here’s a cautionary question for those of us who are gung-ho about the possibilities of the online world: where would the UK phone-hacking story be without the Guardian?

Answer: nowhere. The Murdoch political and news-management machine would have been able to get away with it. It was the Guardian that kept the phone-hacking story alive, long after most other journalistic institutions, Parliament, the police and the Press Complaints Commission had given up on it. One of the many reasons Peter Oborne’s Telegraph essay on the affair was so remarkable is that he paid tribute to the Guardian for performing “such a wonderful service to public decency by bringing to light the shattering depravity of Mr Murdoch’s newspaper empire”. For one British newspaper to pay tribute to another in this way is almost unprecedented, but in this case Oborne is right.

The really important point is that there are some things that can only be done by a properly organised and funded news organisation. Investigating a scandal like this requires great skill (of the kind displayed by Nick Davies and his colleagues), plus determination, courage and resources — legal and logistical. These don’t come cheap and have to be funded, somehow. I yield to nobody in my enthusiasm for what Charlie Beckett calls networked journalism, and I’m a great believer in harnessing collective IQ by crowdsourcing and so on, but a scandal like the illegal behaviour of the Digger’s satraps and their accomplices in the Metropolitan Police is unlikely to be exposed just by the Net. Much of the posturing by print media about how important newspapers are for democracy is just cant, because it confuses a format (the printed paper) with function (journalism). What matters — what democracy needs — is great journalism of the kind practised by Nick Davies and his colleagues. And that needs organisations — and business models — that can support it.

(Full disclosure: I write for the Guardian‘s sister paper, the Observer, but am not — and never have been — an employee, and these views are very much my own.)

Fascinating research using network analysis of email communications.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Political thrillers that portray a “web of corruption” get it all wrong, at least according to an analysis of e-mails between Enron employees. The flow of the famously corrupt corporation’s electronic missives suggests that dirty dealings tend to transpire through a sparse, wheel-and-spoke network rather than a highly connected web.

Employees who were engaged in both legitimate and shady projects at the company conveyed information much differently when their dealings were illicit, organizational theorist Brandy Aven of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh reported June 1 at an MIT workshop on social networks. The distinction is visible in the network of e-mails among employees, which takes the shape of a wheel with a central hub and isolated spokes when content is corrupt, rather than a highly connected net of exchanges.

In the chart, the network of email communications about a corrupt project came out looking like the left-hand graph.

So network analysis tools are useful in forensic examination of communications. But so also are less sophisticated tools. Prosecutors in a recent big insider trading investigation in New York found that a key phrase to look for in email communications was “phone me”.