The Selfie and Marshall McLuhan
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0:00 - 0:21(Intro jingle)
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0:21 - 0:23I'm Paul Levinson
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0:23 - 0:28and welcome to Light On Light Through,
episode 93: -
0:29 - 0:32The Selfie and Marshall McLuhan.
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0:34 - 0:44Well, you might ask how and what did
Marshall McLuhan, who left this earth in 1980, -
0:45 - 0:48what did he have to say about the selfie,
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0:48 - 0:53which of course didn't even exist until
just a few years ago. -
0:54 - 0:57The answer, I think, is very interesting.
-
0:57 - 1:02One of the real joys about
understanding McLuhan -
1:02 - 1:08is how what he wrote in the 50's,
the 60's and the 1970's -
1:09 - 1:12so accurately predicted
-
1:13 - 1:18what our communications and media
are doing today. -
1:18 - 1:26And even better than that in some ways,
is the way that some people who have read McLuhan -
1:27 - 1:35compound insights, just in their everyday lives,
when they realize that hey, this is something -
1:35 - 1:40that McLuhan might have actually been
talking about, -
1:40 - 1:48and something that McLuhan's ideas
can help us understand and explain -
1:49 - 1:54in hopefully a unique and valuable way.
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1:54 - 1:58So, here is one of my favorite examples:
-
1:58 - 2:04a true story, something that happened
to me about 5 or 6 months ago. -
2:05 - 2:07I actually wrote a blog post about it.
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2:07 - 2:13Now I'm finally getting around to doing
a podcast episode about this. -
2:14 - 2:19I posted a photo on Twitter,
of Marshall McLuhan, -
2:20 - 2:27his son Eric McLuhan and me
that was taken in the late 1970's, -
2:27 - 2:32when I had organized a conference
at Fairleigh Dickinson University, -
2:32 - 2:37which is where I was teaching then:
it's in Teaneck, New Jersey. -
2:38 - 2:44The conference was about the Tetrad
or the Laws of the Media. -
2:44 - 2:48Now, I'll get back to that in a moment.
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2:48 - 2:52But one of the first people
to comment on the photo -
2:53 - 2:58was a current media theorist,
by the name of Ian Bogost, -
2:59 - 3:02who said: 'Where is the fourth?'
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3:04 - 3:08Now, in order to understand why
Ian asked that question, -
3:09 - 3:15now, I'll explain to you what the Tetrad or
Laws of the Media are all about. -
3:16 - 3:20And they go back to the mid to late 1970s
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3:21 - 3:27when Marshall McLuhan began publishing
some short articles and talking about -
3:27 - 3:33what he was terming 'the laws of the media',
or 'laws of media'. -
3:33 - 3:38And in fact, there were four laws:
hence the word 'tetrad' -
3:38 - 3:47which is a way of saying 'four';
a triad is three, a tetrad is four. -
3:48 - 3:52And to give you an example,
you could do a tetrad -
3:52 - 4:01or apply McLuhan's Laws of Media to radio
and its impact, and how people used it. -
4:01 - 4:09And you can begin by looking at the first
consequence or effect of radio. -
4:09 - 4:14McLuhan called this first law,
this first law of the Tetrad, -
4:15 - 4:18enhancement or amplification.
-
4:19 - 4:26And what the radio clearly does is
it amplifies or enhances -
4:27 - 4:34instant verbal, acoustic communication
across long distances. -
4:36 - 4:41The second law has to do with what
the new technology or media replaces -
4:41 - 4:44and McLuhan called this obsolescence.
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4:45 - 4:51So, you can clearly see that one of the
things that radio obsolesced -
4:51 - 4:57was the printed word, in a variety of ways:
say, newspapers. -
4:58 - 5:02They used to be the only way
that people received news. -
5:02 - 5:09Once radio came along, in the 1920's
and really began expanding in the 1930's, -
5:09 - 5:15people increasingly began to get
their news, not just from newspapers, -
5:15 - 5:17but from radio reports.
-
5:18 - 5:21Or consider something
like a sporting event. -
5:22 - 5:27That's something where,
up until the introduction of radio, -
5:27 - 5:33people had to read about what their favorite
teams did, in the newspaper: -
5:34 - 5:36either later in the day, or the next day.
-
5:37 - 5:43But what radio did is,
it also allowed people to listen to games -
5:43 - 5:47as they were actually occurring,
in real time. -
5:49 - 5:53The third law, or third part of the tetrad,
gets even more interesting, -
5:53 - 5:58because McLuhan said that
every new medium or technology -
5:58 - 6:00first of all enhances something,
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6:00 - 6:06second of all obsolesces
or eclipses something, something else, -
6:06 - 6:11and third of all, retrieves
some kind of communication -
6:11 - 6:15which itself had been previously obsolesced.
-
6:16 - 6:23And so, again clearly, what radio does is
it retrieves the spoken word. -
6:24 - 6:26Now the spoken word,
of course, never disappeared. -
6:27 - 6:32So it's not as if this retrieval was
digging something up -
6:32 - 6:33which had been out of use.
-
6:33 - 6:38The spoken word continued to be important,
and continues to be important right now. -
6:39 - 6:41That's the way it has been
throughout human history. -
6:42 - 6:46But there's also no doubt that
what the written word did -
6:47 - 6:54is, to some extent in some cases,
take emphasis away from the spoken word. -
6:55 - 6:59For example, once upon a time,
the spoken word was -
6:59 - 7:05a more important commitment,
in a contractual, legal sense, -
7:06 - 7:07than the written word.
-
7:08 - 7:11But after the printing press,
for a variety of reasons, -
7:12 - 7:19the written word became legally much more
binding than the spoken word. -
7:19 - 7:24So radio obviously retrieves
the spoken word. -
7:25 - 7:30Now, in some ways,
the fourth law of the Tetrad, -
7:30 - 7:35or the fourth law in MacLuhan's
Laws of Media -
7:35 - 7:39I think is probably
the most interesting and fascinating, -
7:39 - 7:46because McLuhan said that eventually,
when a medium is pushed to its limits, -
7:47 - 7:52meaning that it can't do any more
as that media, -
7:53 - 7:58at that point,
it flips into something else. -
7:59 - 8:01And again,
if you look at the history of radio, -
8:01 - 8:04what happened with radio eventually?
-
8:05 - 8:09Well, by the end of the 1940's,
radio flipped into television, -
8:10 - 8:12which has a lot of similarities to radio:
-
8:12 - 8:15it's broadcast, it could be live,
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8:16 - 8:21but it's very different from radio,
because you have a visual component. -
8:22 - 8:29And in a way, what television does is,
it retrieves the visual component -
8:29 - 8:32that radio had formerly obsolesced.
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8:33 - 8:36Now, one of the nice things of the Tetrad
is, you can apply it -
8:36 - 8:41to many different threads
of media evolution. -
8:41 - 8:45And that's something that I've been doing
ever since I first wrote the preface -
8:46 - 8:50to the publication of
McLuhan's 'Laws of the Media' -
8:50 - 8:55back in 1977, in Etcetera magazine,
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8:55 - 9:00and I did that when I was actually
a Ph.D. student at New York University. -
9:00 - 9:03But one of the things that
didn't exist back then -
9:04 - 9:08was what you're listening to right now:
the podcast. -
9:08 - 9:13And so, one of the things that radio
verses into is the podcast. -
9:13 - 9:17Like television, the podcast
has similarities with radio. -
9:18 - 9:20It's the spoken word, it's sound.
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9:20 - 9:24But unlike radio,
anybody can do a podcast. -
9:25 - 9:27I'm a professor, I'm an author,
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9:27 - 9:33but I certainly have no
radio professional experience. -
9:33 - 9:37I've been on a few radio shows: actually,
probably dozens over the years, -
9:37 - 9:39but I've never had my own radio show.
-
9:40 - 9:46I'm not a professional, I'm not considered
a professional in the radio business. -
9:46 - 9:50But that doesn't matter,
because anybody can do a podcast. -
9:51 - 9:59So, one of the things that radio has
recently flipped into is the podcast. -
9:59 - 10:04So, now let's go back to what
Ian Bogost was asking -
10:04 - 10:10when I posted this photo of
Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan and me, -
10:10 - 10:15taken at the conference
at Fairleigh Dickinson University -
10:15 - 10:24where we were considering the Tetrad
and the Laws of Media, back in 1977. -
10:26 - 10:31Well, why was Ian Bogost saying
"Where is the fourth?"? -
10:31 - 10:36He was talking about
the Tetrad having four parts -
10:36 - 10:40and he only saw three people
in the photograph. -
10:40 - 10:42So that was a pretty clever question.
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10:43 - 10:46But as soon
as I read that question on Twitter, -
10:47 - 10:50the answer popped into my head immediately.
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10:51 - 10:55The fourth in that photograph is the selfie.
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10:56 - 11:00Now, actually, somebody else,
Mary-Lou Bale, one of my students -
11:00 - 11:02took that photograph.
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11:02 - 11:11But nowadays, you can clearly see that
the photograph has flipped into the selfie. -
11:11 - 11:13So let's do a Tetrad for the photograph.
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11:14 - 11:17What does it enhance or amplify?
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11:17 - 11:23Well, capturing the visual world
as it actually is. -
11:24 - 11:29And that clearly points at what
the photograph obsolesces: the painting, -
11:30 - 11:36in which what is on the painting
is dependent on the talent of the painter, -
11:36 - 11:41in contrast to the photograph, where
the photographer has to have some talent -
11:42 - 11:46but the essence of the photograph is just the purely
-
11:46 - 11:51-- originally, photo-chemical process --
now digital process -
11:51 - 11:56in which the light bounces off the real world or
whatever you are taking a photograph of, -
11:57 - 11:59and you then have a photograph.
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12:00 - 12:08So the painter, the pen-and-ink sketcher,
is obsolesced by the photograph -
12:08 - 12:09and by the photographer.
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12:10 - 12:14Well, what does the photograph
and the photographer retrieve, -
12:14 - 12:16which had been previously lost?
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12:16 - 12:19Well, you can look into a pool of water.
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12:20 - 12:26And in fact, McLuhan talked about this when he
talked about the Greek myth of Narcisus -
12:27 - 12:32who stared at his reflection
in a crystal-clear pool of water. -
12:33 - 12:37That's in effect what
a photograph is retrieving, -
12:37 - 12:44because that's not an artist's interpretation,
that's an actual reflection of the world. -
12:44 - 12:46And so, we get to the end:
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12:46 - 12:51What does the photograph, let's even say,
the still photograph, -
12:51 - 12:53what does it flip into?
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12:53 - 12:56Well, over the years,
it has flipped into many things. -
12:57 - 12:59It's flipped into motion pictures,
-
13:00 - 13:05it's flipped into the Kodak photograph
which could be taken by anyone: -
13:05 - 13:09the first photographs were only taken
by professional photographers. -
13:10 - 13:15It's flipped into the polaroid,
which is an instant photograph. -
13:15 - 13:19And of course, it's flipped very recently
into the photographs -
13:19 - 13:21that we all take with our phones.
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13:22 - 13:29But I think the selfie most epitomizes what
the photograph has currently flipped into. -
13:29 - 13:35Because as we all know, millions of photographs
are now taken by simply pointing -
13:35 - 13:41the camera in our smart phone at ourselves.
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13:41 - 13:48And so, that's what the photographer,
I think, has flipped into. -
13:49 - 13:57Anyway, you can read more about McLuhan
and the Tetrad in many places. -
13:57 - 13:59I'll recommend one of my books,
-
13:59 - 14:04"Digital McLuhan - a Guide to
the Information Millennium" -
14:04 - 14:08which I wrote back in 1999.
-
14:09 - 14:13You'll find a link to that
on the podcast page, -
14:14 - 14:24which is lightonlightthrough.com.
-
14:25 - 14:31And by the way, Light On Light Through
is a term I also got from McLuhan. -
14:33 - 14:40So, if you ever have a chance, read not only
my books and other books about McLuhan -
14:40 - 14:44but read some of McLuhan's
original works themselves. -
14:44 - 14:47Some people find them
a little hard to get into, -
14:47 - 14:55but if you give them some time, you'll be
rewarded by a cornucopia of insights -
14:55 - 15:04and tools that we can use to help make
sense of our rapidly evolving media age. -
15:05 - 15:07(Female voice) The Light On Light Through podcast
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15:08 - 16:19(Music and announcements)
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16:19 - 16:45(Outro jingle)
- Title:
- The Selfie and Marshall McLuhan
- Description:
-
Paul Levinson, "Light On Light Through" podcast, Episode 93 - http://paullev.libsyn.com/the-selfie-and-marshall-mcluhan .
See, for the things referred to in this episode:- https://twitter.com/PaulLev/status/452886405262241793 for the picture of McLuhan, Ian McLuhan and him
- http://paullevinson.blogspot.ch/2014/04/tetrad-on-selfie.html for the blogpost about the exchange he had with Ian Bogost about the picture.See also the http://paullevinson.blogspot.ch/2014/10/photography-flips-into-snapchat.html post where he mentioned this podcast episode.
- Video Language:
- English
Claude Almansi edited English subtitles for The Selfie and Marshall McLuhan | ||
Claude Almansi edited English subtitles for The Selfie and Marshall McLuhan | ||
Claude Almansi edited English subtitles for The Selfie and Marshall McLuhan | ||
Claude Almansi edited English subtitles for The Selfie and Marshall McLuhan |