Tetrad
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt, "The Future of 'Newl Media' ", prepared for publication in 1974 for a proposed French encyclopedia of "futures"; Eric and Marshall McLuhan, "Gesetze der MedienStmkturelle Annaherung", Unte~ichtswissenschaft, Berlin: Beltz Verlag Sonderdruck, 1974, pp. 79-84.
We can all become explorers
of communication media by observing their psychic and social effects in changing
situations. McLuhan and his associates have been demonstrating how toexposethemetaphoric
powers of any human artifact, hardware or software, ancient or
modem, with a "tetrad" of four questions:
(A) What does it intensify
or enhance?
(B) What does it replace or obsolesce?
(C) What does it revive or retrieve of similar nature, previously
obsolesced?
(D) What does it flip into when pushed to the extremes of its
potentials?
WRITING IN THE PHONETIC ALPHABET
(A) Enhances private authorship
and the individual ego;
(B) Reduces aural-oral memory;
(C) Retrieves and revives secret inner life;
(D) Flips into history as the corporate record of private life.
(A) Increase speed of communication
to virtual instantaneity,
compress the sequent into the simultaneous, and create the new
information environment;
(B) Erode visual and logically connected order;
(C) Retrieve audile-tactile dialogue, and revive tribal involvement
and the occult;
(D) Reverse the order of transmission as the "etherealized" sender
gets sent: youare there,and they are hereinstantly asdiscarnate minds.
(A) Extend the planet;
(B) Obsolesce fragmented nature;
(C) Retrieve ecology;
(D) Convert nature into art form, globe into theatre,andspectators
into actors.
RE-COGNITION BY INSTANT REPLAY
(A) Amplifies cognitive
awareness;
(B) Obsolesces representational images;
(C) Retrieves meaning through participation in (A);
(D) Flips individual experience into process pattern recognition.