Tetrad of Media!

The Medium is the Massage! (by Marshall McLuhan)

Media analyst, Marshall McLuhan, is describing how media, specially the modern media, is extensions of human senses by the book, The Medium is the Massage.

Well, for an example, a cell phone is an extension for our voice, or a TV extends human senses like the eyes and ears.

Any extensions have the effect of amputating other extensions; for example, by inventing the cell phone and telephone, no body uses telegraph or Morse, so these media now are obsolete and useless as the new technology like telephone is a better extension for human voice. Now by technology development, newspapers and books are not the only media that any person can refer to get information from, as anyone is able to learn from different different sources and media like TV, Radio, Internet, SMS, and so on. As a result, technology made the globe like a small village which anyone could figure out about someone else or society or culture, event, celebration, or anything elses as soon as a news was distributed in a small village ages before! Hence the term "Global Village" make sense.

Marshall McLuhan explained his ideas by examining a medium or technology in a society and studying the effects of it by dividing any medium effects into four different aspects which are Enhances, Reverses, Retrieves, Obsolesces that all together make a diagram which is named Tetrad of Media.

Now I am going to explain each value of this Tetrad through an example:

Medium: Video Camera

Questions:

1. What does a Video Camera extend/ enhance?

A Video Camera could extend human eye, ear and memory.

2. What does a Video Camera make obsolete?

Theatre has been obsoleting since the video camera has been invented.

3. What is retrieved?

Cinemas has been retrieved.

4. What does a Video Camera reverse into in case of over extended?

Mankind will never trust his mind and memories without a camera, and everything must be established on a tape or disc to be acceptable! OR Maybe people like to see live events instead of recorded videos by over extending the Camera!

Reflection on media culture class:

To be ownest, I prefer to see more pictures and videos instead of PowerPoint documents, as there are a lot of information in a PowerPoint page which takes long to read and hard to understand while we are listening to our lecturer at same time.