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