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(Intro jingle)

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I'm Paul Levinson

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and welcome to Light On Light Through,
episode 93:

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The Selfie and Marshall McLuhan.

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Well, you might ask how and what did
Marshall McLuhan, who left this earth in 1980,

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what did he have to say about the selfie,

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which of course didn't even exist until 
just a few years ago.

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The answer, I think, is very interesting.

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One of the real joys about 
understanding McLuhan

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is how what he wrote in the 50's, 
the 60's and the 1970's

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so accurately predicted

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what our communications and media
are doing today.

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And even better than that in some ways,
is the way that some people who have read McLuhan

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compound insights, just in their everyday lives,
when they realize that hey, this is something

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that McLuhan might have actually been
talking about,

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and something that McLuhan's ideas
can help us understand and explain

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in hopefully a unique and valuable way.

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So, here is one of my favorite examples:

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a true story, something that happened 
to me about 5 or 6 months ago.

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I actually wrote a blog post about it.

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Now I'm finally getting around to doing 
a podcast episode about this.

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I posted a photo on Twitter, 
of Marshall McLuhan,

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his son Eric McLuhan and me
that was taken in the late 1970's,

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when I had organized a conference
at Fairleigh Dickinson University,

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which is where I was teaching then:
it's in Teaneck, New Jersey.

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The conference was about the Tetrad
or the Laws of the Media.

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Now, I'll get back to that in a moment.

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But one of the first people 
to comment on the photo

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was a current media theorist,
by the name of Ian Bogost,

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who said: 'Where is the fourth?'

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Now, in order to understand why
Ian asked that question,

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now, I'll explain to you what the Tetrad or
Laws of the Media are all about.

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And they go back to the mid to late 1970s

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when Marshall McLuhan began publishing
some short articles and talking about

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what he was terming 'the laws of the media',
or 'laws of media'.

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And in fact, there were four laws:
hence the word 'tetrad'

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which is a way of saying 'four';
a triad is three, a tetrad is four.

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And to give you an example, 
you could do a tetrad

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or apply McLuhan's Laws of Media to radio 
and its impact, and how people used it.

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And you can begin by looking at the first 
consequence or effect of radio.

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McLuhan called this first law, 
this first law of the Tetrad,

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enhancement or amplification.

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And what the radio clearly does is
it amplifies or enhances

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instant verbal, acoustic communication
across long distances.

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The second law has to do with what
the new technology or media replaces

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and McLuhan called this obsolescence.

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So, you can clearly see that one of the 
things that radio obsolesced

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was the printed word, in a variety of ways: 
say, newspapers.

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They used to be the only way 
that people received news.

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Once radio came along, in the 1920's
and really began expanding in the 1930's,

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people increasingly began to get 
their news, not just from newspapers,

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but from radio reports.

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Or consider something 
like a sporting event.

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That's something where,
up until the introduction of radio,

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people had to read about what their favorite 
teams did, in the newspaper:

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either later in the day, or the next day.

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But what radio did is, 
it also allowed people to listen to games

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as they were actually occurring, 
in real time.

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The third law, or third part of the tetrad, 
gets even more interesting,

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because McLuhan said that 
every new medium or technology

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first of all enhances something,

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second of all obsolesces 
or eclipses something, something else,

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and third of all, retrieves 
some kind of communication

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which itself had been previously obsolesced.

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And so, again clearly, what radio does is
it retrieves the spoken word.

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Now the spoken word, 
of course, never disappeared.

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So it's not as if this retrieval was 
digging something up

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which had been out of use.

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The spoken word continued to be important,
and continues to be important right now.

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That's the way it has been 
throughout human history.

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But there's also no doubt that 
what the written word did

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is, to some extent in some cases,
take emphasis away from the spoken word.

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For example, once upon a time, 
the spoken word was

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a more important commitment, 
in a contractual, legal sense,

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than the written word.

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But after the printing press, 
for a variety of reasons,

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the written word became legally much more 
binding than the spoken word.

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So radio obviously retrieves 
the spoken word.

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Now, in some ways, 
the fourth law of the Tetrad,

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or the fourth law in MacLuhan's 
Laws of Media

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I think is probably 
the most interesting and fascinating,

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because McLuhan said that eventually, 
when a medium is pushed to its limits,

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meaning that it can't do any more 
as that media,

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at that point, 
it flips into something else.

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And again, 
if you look at the history of radio,

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what happened with radio eventually?

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Well, by the end of the 1940's, 
radio flipped into television,

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which has a lot of similarities to radio:

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it's broadcast, it could be live,

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but it's very different from radio, 
because you have a visual component.

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And in a way, what television does is, 
it retrieves the visual component

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that radio had formerly obsolesced.

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Now, one of the nice things of the Tetrad 
is, you can apply it

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to many different threads 
of media evolution.

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And that's something that I've been doing 
ever since I first wrote the preface

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to the publication of 
McLuhan's 'Laws of the Media'

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back in 1977, in Etcetera magazine,

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and I did that when I was actually 
a Ph.D. student at New York University.

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But one of the things that 
didn't exist back then

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was what you're listening to right now:
the podcast.

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And so, one of the things that radio 
verses into is the podcast.

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Like television, the podcast 
has similarities with radio.

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It's the spoken word, it's sound.

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But unlike radio, 
anybody can do a podcast.

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I'm a professor, I'm an author,

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but I certainly have no 
radio professional experience.

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I've been on a few radio shows: actually, 
probably dozens over the years,

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but I've never had my own radio show.

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I'm not a professional, I'm not considered 
a professional in the radio business.

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But that doesn't matter, 
because anybody can do a podcast.

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So, one of the things that radio has 
recently flipped into is the podcast.

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So, now let's go back to what 
Ian Bogost was asking

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when I posted this photo of 
Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan and me,

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taken at the conference 
at Fairleigh Dickinson University

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where we were considering the Tetrad
and the Laws of Media, back in 1977.

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Well, why was Ian Bogost saying 
"Where is the fourth?"?

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He was talking about 
the Tetrad having four parts

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and he only saw three people 
in the photograph.

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So that was a pretty clever question.

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But as soon 
as I read that question on Twitter,

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the answer popped into my head immediately.

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The fourth in that photograph is the selfie.

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Now, actually, somebody else, 
Mary-Lou Bale, one of my students

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took that photograph.

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But nowadays, you can clearly see that 
the photograph has flipped into the selfie.

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So let's do a Tetrad for the photograph.

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What does it enhance or amplify?

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Well, capturing the visual world 
as it actually is.

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And that clearly points at what 
the photograph obsolesces: the painting,

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in which what is on the painting 
is dependent on the talent of the painter,

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in contrast to the photograph, where 
the photographer has to have some talent

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but the essence of the photograph is just the purely

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-- originally, photo-chemical process -- 
now digital process

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in which the light bounces off the real world or 
whatever you are taking a photograph of,

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and you then have a photograph.

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So the painter, the pen-and-ink sketcher, 
is obsolesced by the photograph

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and by the photographer.

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Well, what does the photograph 
and the photographer retrieve,

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which had been previously lost?

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Well, you can look into a pool of water.

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And in fact, McLuhan talked about this when he 
talked about the Greek myth of Narcisus

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who stared at his reflection 
in a crystal-clear pool of water.

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That's in effect what 
a photograph is retrieving,

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because that's not an artist's interpretation,
that's an actual reflection of the world.

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And so, we get to the end:

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What does the photograph, let's even say, 
the still photograph,

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what does it flip into?

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Well, over the years, 
it has flipped into many things.

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It's flipped into motion pictures,

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it's flipped into the Kodak photograph
which could be taken by anyone:

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the first photographs were only taken 
by professional photographers.

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It's flipped into the polaroid, 
which is an instant photograph.

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And of course, it's flipped very recently 
into the photographs

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that we all take with our phones.

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But I think the selfie most epitomizes what 
the photograph has currently flipped into.

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Because as we all know, millions of photographs 
are now taken by simply pointing

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the camera in our smart phone at ourselves.

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And so, that's what the photographer, 
I think, has flipped into.

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Anyway, you can read more about McLuhan 
and the Tetrad in many places.

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I'll recommend one of my books,

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"Digital McLuhan - a Guide to 
the Information Millennium"

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which I wrote back in 1999.

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You'll find a link to that 
on the podcast page,

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which is lightonlightthrough.com.

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And by the way, Light On Light Through 
is a term I also got from McLuhan.

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So, if you ever have a chance, read not only 
my books and other books about McLuhan

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but read some of McLuhan's 
original works themselves.

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Some people find them 
a little hard to get into,

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but if you give them some time, you'll be 
rewarded by a cornucopia of insights

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and tools that we can use to help make 
sense of our rapidly evolving media age.

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(Female voice) The Light On Light Through podcast

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(Music and announcements)

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