Interpretation on Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the tetrad’ diagram (Week 10)
Monday, 11 September 2017 | 19:46:00 | 0 Words
Late in his life, Marshall McLuhan developed the idea of using tetrads to apply a consistent mode of analysis to different media. The idea behind them is simple: to make sure that you ask the same questions in the same way about different media.In the Laws of Media(1988), written by McLuhan with his son Eric and published posthumously, he argues that tetrads are “a means of focusing awareness on hidden or unobserved qualities in our culture and technology”. This follows from his argument that all “human artefacts are human utterances, or outerings, and as such they are linguistic and rhetorical entities. At the same time the etymology of all of all human technologies is to be found in the human body itself: they are, as it were, prosthetic devices, mutations, metaphors of the body or its parts”.
McLuhan argues that the effects of every media can be viewed in four ways, and that the tetrad offers an “exegisis on four levels, showing the logos-structure of each artefact, and giving its four ‘parts’ as metaphor, or word” .The tetrad is therefore a grid with four sections. (as shown above)
ENH (enhance)
“First, extension: as an ‘extension of man’ every technology extends or amplifies some organ or faculty of the user.”
Amplify. Extend. Speed up. Intensify. Increase. Upgrade. Improve the quality, value, reach of… . Every new medium enhances some human faculty or function, or builds upon an existing medium.
OBS (obsolesce)
OBS (obsolesce)
“Then, the attendant ‘closure’: because there is an equilibrium in sensibility, when one area of experience is heightened or intensified, another is diminished or numbed.”
Obsolete doesn’t mean dead — just no longer in charge. Out of date. Out of fashion. Version 1.0 when v.2.0 is out. What does the new medium take over from? What does it make unnecessary?
REV (reverse)
REV (reverse)
“…a third, with a chapter of its own in UM (‘Reversal of the Overheated Medium’): every form, pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics.”
When pushed, a medium will reverse it’s characteristics. For instance, the highway is meant to speed up traffic, make travel easier, but when you have too many cars on the road at once, you get a traffic jam — this is the flip or “reversal of the overheated medium”. The phrase “tipping point” is the point of reversal.
RET (retrieve)
RET (retrieve)
“At first we thought retrieval entailed only the recasting of whatever formed the content of the new form. That is does (the content of any medium is an older medium) and considerably more.”
Reclaim. Bring back. Revival. Retro. This is the etymology of media, its roots. What’s old is new. There’s nothing new under the sun. Every medium also retrieves some previous medium. To answer this question can be very difficult and requires a lot of knowledge of history and the past.
The tetrad is arrived at through a process of asking questions, based on historical, social, and technological knowledge of the subject:
*What does any artifact enlarge or enhance?
*What does it erode or obsolesce?
*What does it retrieve that had been earlier obsolesced?
*What does it reverse or flip into when pushed to the limits of its potential?
These questions result in a set of four effects, namely: enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal. These four elements are in a resonant relationship (or “interchange”) with one another; the parts of the tetrad are in a complementary relationship:
An example for the cellphone:-
