Reading II: McLuhan
To further understand the media of print, radio, television, cell-phones, the internet… we place them each in the center of McLuhan’s Four Laws of Media Tetrad.
Print media enhances the spoken word. Print gives human beings a way to record spoken stories, history, rules, laws, etc. We can now pass information on to future generations with out having to be present. Not only is the information stored more accurately and permanently; data can be distributed to a much larger population over large distances and in a shorter time-span. So in essence print media makes face-to-face story telling somewhat obsolete. It also makes obsolete the need for scribes and those who write longhand copies. In the same breath, print media later brings a once obsolesced form of communication back from the dead… illuminated manuscripts, handwritten books, etc. With the invention of the photograph the printing press becomes an incredible tool where objects like illuminated manuscripts, which were once only accessible to those who viewed them in museums, are now available to everyone at a local library. And when pushed to extremes print media can become akin to the relationship that it had with language… Just as language is too much for any one brain to save and pass on so has the printed materials become too abundant to be received by everyone. There is no possible way for any one person to read every book created, not to mention distributing them all… a new technology may be needed?
Like the effect that print had on language, although not as much of a sea change, radio’s influence on the world is still quite notable. Radio unlike print is cheaper to produce and more importantly can be distributed to a much wider audience. Radio is immediate. Radio can be live. Books and printed materials like newspapers and magazines took hours, days, weeks, years to produce making the information dated and some times obsolete by the time it was finally read. Radio is information at the touch of a dial; keeping people in the know about what’s going on in the world around them in real time… well, at least closer to real time. The immediacy of radio obsolesces print and the visual media. Not killing print but making it less dominant. Another thing to note is that during the time that radio is introduced not many people could read… so spoken language reached more individuals perhaps. Which brings me to spoken language becoming a more central way of thinking about communication again. Stories are told in songs and in spoken literature through means of poems and radio programmed shows. At the extreme, radio paints a picture with words and metaphors and therefore becomes an audible representation of images similar to the printed page.
Born from the merging of the print and radio media; television becomes the dominant form of communication. The ability to give the viewer a much more rich experience… closer still to reality, gives television a leg up on previous technologies. Instead of imagining how people look, sound, walk, talk, dance, we can see them doing these things with movement and sound. The new media of television upstages both radio and print by presenting both at once. With television you have the immediacy of radio and the documentation of print (TV is taped). Television retrieves the image from the boundaries of print and it also retrieves reading from print; subtitles, credits, back stories, etc. Television at it’s extreme becomes overwhelming and hard to watch… too much information and visual stimulus can turn a viewer off, making them hard to reach. If you can’t reach viewers, you’ve lost your purpose of communicating.
Cell phones introduce another dynamic to consider… two way communication. The other technologies we have looked at explore only a one-way model of communication. Cell phones allow the parties involved to have feedback; similar to the letter or mail. Mail is on the chopping block for obsolescence with the advent of cell phones for obvious reasons… immediacy being the number one but also as important: always being connected to someone. With cell phone in hand one can be virtually anywhere and call anyone in the world as long as they also have a phone. Today the cell phones are even more connected since they can even get on line and check email and Facebook and other social networking apps. The cell phone retrieves the spoken word/story telling even more than radio had years before. Now you can talk to anyone… anytime. It also brings back print with text messaging. Too busy to talk? Text me. Very powerful. Cell phones can maybe reverse their intended goal to connect everyone by actually connecting everyone so that everyone is connected at once and the phone becomes a leash because you always have to be connected…
Finally we come to the granddaddy of our technological creatures the internets (a series of tubes). The internet is the one that does it all. You get the immediacy of radio and television with the 2-way connectivity of cell phones. With phones however you are limited to the amount of people you can talk to at any given time. With the development of sharing and social networks on the internet, the number of people connected is only limited to the amount of people plugged in (and bandwidth of course). The Internet acts as a virtual space akin to reality where people are ultimately connected and interact in this new space similar to how they could act face to face in real life. In the new space there are so many different resources that you wouldn’t have at your disposal if you were interacting in a face-to-face environment. The internet is slowly creating a world in which television will merge with the internet making television a part of the net and therefore the vehicle of television becomes obsolete. The internet retrieves all obsolete mediums and makes them accessible in an interactive environment. At the extreme the internet reverses the idea of connectivity. Where everyone is connected virtually and not connected in reality… but then again… what is reality?
