Social Media Marketing - Marshall McLuhan

The Tetrad

As stated on Mind Before You Mine and here on the link provided by my instructor, McLuhan's principal of 'The Media is the Message' is plainly seen by a tetrad of effects that happen simultaneously with the introduction and application of the medium. Keep in mind that, according to him, media is an extension of the human mind, much like tools are an extension of the human body. Due to this, we see these four effects:

Enhance The technology must enhance some capability of the person.	Retrieve The result is a retrieval of some earlier service or capability that was lost and is now brought back into play in a new form.
Obsolesced What is pushed aside and made obsolescent.	Reverse If the new media is taken to extreme what will result that reverses the original characteristics of the media when it was first introduced.

Now, we can apply this to the internet as a whole, or individual aspects of the internet such as social media, and get completely different results. This is due to, as previously discussed in earlier posts, each form of social media relaying a different message. And positing that a form of media carries a message in and of itself, we see those differences coming to light in the form of this tetrad.

For instance, applying this principal to the Internet as a whole, we'll find that the internet itself Enhances thought due to its quickly accessible nature, and how quickly we can share ideas. However, the Reverse effect of thought would be thoughtless acts. Because of the instantaneous nature of the internet, we can often find ourselves typing a thoughtless and careless comment or article, even more so than if we were to say it out loud. Because of the text-based nature of many websites (though not all), the early web made Obsolete books, magazines and other forms of print media, Retrieving the old idea of the Athens Forum, where ideas would mesh and mingle together freely.  Let's try applying this tetrad to another form of social media that I haven't talked much about yet on this blog: YouTube.  I will be applying this tetrad myself, using only my opinions, but to illustrate the idea of the concept.

YouTube is a place where personal videos can be freely uploaded and streamed by the internet, where others may comment on your videos, subscribe to your feed and so on. As such, I feel that YouTube Enhances Opinion and Creativity.  However, the Reverse of this is intellectual theft and ignorance, due to the open nature of the medium. Ideas can be shared, regardless of if they're correct or even yours in the first place.  Of course, the principal of YouTube Retrieves the principal of the talent show or art forum, where your talents and ideas can be shown to a wide mass of individuals at once, though makes Obsolete the television. When a program can be freely retrieved, and commercials more specifically targeting their audience, you make television redundant. If all shows became available on YouTube (or similar service more oriented to TV shows and movies, such as Netflix or Hulu) the day they aired, then only those who hadn't adopted the newer technology would still watch on their television. As well, anybody can make programming for YouTube, unlike television. Though you could record your own video and put it on tape or DVD, YouTube reaches a much greater audience of 'anybody that can stream video on the internet' rather than just who you give the tape or DVD to.

I feel that McLuhan's principal of the media making the message holds true, even today, and as such we need to take an extremely close look at what message the media we market in sends. Keep this tetrad in mind when you're choosing the forms of media you plan on utilizing. Does it fit your goals?