“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effects upon him.”*…
In the early 1970’s Marshall McLuhan and his son set out to discover if there might be general principles of technology, attributes, and effects common to all products of human innovation, to all of these artificial extensions of ourselves. Eric’s son, Andrew McLuhan shares their findings…
… Toward the end of his life, a life which ended before his 70th birthday, Avant Garde magazine asked Marshall McLuhan what he considered his greatest achievement. His reply?
“I consider my greatest achievement is the discovery that all human artifacts, all the extensions of man, are patterned structurally in the mode of the word. Whether it is a medium like radio, a bull dozer, or a safety pin; whether it is the word or a law of science, all these utterings and outerings of man have a four-part structure which is that of metaphor itself. I will illustrate this discovery from the character of money, which:
(a) enhances the speed of exchange
(b) obsolesces barter
(c) retrieves potlatch (conspicuous waste) and
(d) when pushed to its limits, flips or reverses its character into credit.
A book of these things is due to appear, title ‘The Laws of the Media’.”
But no one was interested in publishing it. It wasn’t published until 1988 when Eric McLuhan finally got someone – University of Toronto Press – to put it out as ‘Laws of Media: The New Science.’ The subtitle was a deliberate nod to Francis Bacon (Novum Organon) and Giambattista Vico (Scienza Nuova) of which tradition the McLuhans felt their work was part.
I have noticed more people using the laws of media, or the ‘tetrad’ (group of four) as it’s called, lately.
The laws of media can’t tell you everything about any technology, but they give you four reliable places from which to begin to explore what any technology is and what it does – another way of saying ‘the medium is the message.’ Particularly, it’s a way of examining the form of a thing and not just its content. The content of a medium, what we do with it, pay attention to, is always both the smaller part of the situation, and the less affective area. In Understanding Media McLuhan brilliantly paraphrases T S Eliot when he describes content as the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The content keeps us busy, hold our attention, while the media do their work rearranging us, our lives, our world. To enlist Mary Poppins, content is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
The four things the McLuhans discovered are that:
Any given technology enhances or amplifies some aspect of us. We create tools to do something we already do faster, more easily or efficiently. Gloves to save our hands. Computers, to calculate. Telephone, that our voice carries across the world.
“It is a persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” (‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ 1964)
It obsolesces, it upsets or displaces, disrupts something already in a dominant position. The Linotype machine put 90% of typesetters out of work. Twitter broke the news that television and radio networks used to.
“Now today, we speak of the book as obsolete. This means the book is acquiring ever new uses in the age of Xerox and the age of paperbacks.” (Marshall and Eric McLuhan in conversation, 1971)
It retrieves, or brings back something from the past, however near or far, in a new form. Text messaging put a telegraph in your pocket. The man in the car, the knight in shining armour.
“What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?” ‘Laws of Media: The New Science’ 1988
When pushed past a point, it tends to flip or reverses its utility or characteristics. A glass of wine or two can make for a good time, relieve stress, grease the social wheels. A few bottles… quite the opposite. Information assists informed, timely decisions, too much information leads to overload, paralysis.
“When pushed to the limits of its potential the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?” (Laws of Media: The New Science 1988)
For example, here’s a tetrad from Laws of Media:
Xerox:
enhances: the speed of the printing press
obsolesces: the assembly-line book
reverses into: everybody becomes a publisher
retrieves: the oral tradition
Laws of Media: The New Science (Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 1988)
While media can be complex in nature and do many things, Marshall and Eric found that all media, without exception, do these four things. As remarkable as this discovery is – so remarkable that Marshall McLuhan considered it his most impressive achievement – almost equally remarkable is that so few people know about it.
They found four things which applied in all cases, but never stopped looking for a fifth. I know my father Eric was still keeping an eye or ear out for a fifth common dimension, something that would apply without exception to all media. A few people have ventured one thing or another but they did not satisfy my father’s criteria…
… The ‘laws of media’ can’t tell you everything about any medium, but it does give us something remarkable: predictability. We know that anything we can come up with will do these four things. It will amplify some part of us. It will make something obsolete. It will bring something back from the past in a new form. It will, when pushed, flip. This is an incredible advantage when it comes to new media. It gives us a real head start on being able to anticipate the effects of new forms on us and our world…
… [Per the title quote above] The point of the tetrad, the point of media studies at all, is to make media visible. To force us to pay attention to what’s happening all around us, sometimes only slightly beneath our awareness, sometimes buried deeply underneath. The true user experience is what we don’t notice but which shapes us all the same…
More (including how to “make” tetrads yourself): “Laws of (New) Media.”
* Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
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As we engage with the emergent, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 that ABC and CBS simultaneously broadcast their own movies based on the Amy Fisher story with ABC’s starring Drew Barrymore and CBS’s starring Alyssa Milano. NBC had already scooped the other networks, airing their own version (starring Noelle Parker) about six days prior.
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