21 November 2010

Media Poetics 2: Tetrads

These are based on Marshall McLuhan's tetrads, which were a series of four questions about communication media. Usually he presented them visually, in a square shape.

The questions are:


1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?



Internet
(enhance) 1 -- the rapid spread of questionably useful information
(obsolesce) 2-- handwriting; novels; attention spans
(retrieve) 3-- superstition
(extreme) 4-- transmigration of souls (a la Star Trek, mysticism)


Jet travel
(enhance) 1-- weekend trips between Laval and Bora Bora
(obsolesce) 2-- trains, road trips Kerouac-style
(retrieve) 3-- transmigration (and transatlantic migration) of souls
(extreme) 4-- a global village

text messaging
(enhance) --instant interpersonal communication
(obsolesce) --handwritten notes from high school; shoeboxes full of said notes; most long-form written styles of communication; the epistolary novel; visually-induced nostalgia
(retrieve) 3--hieroglyphics
(extreme) 4--language becoming expressed entirely by thumb (and in impermanent form); global politics/social work/psychotherapy conducted entirely by text message

1 comment:

sarachka said...

the 'no hand written notes from high school' really gets me. Can't fold text messages into origami either.

Nice work.