WEBVTT 00:00:00.173 --> 00:00:21.022 (Intro jingle) 00:00:21.022 --> 00:00:22.604 I'm Paul Levinson 00:00:22.604 --> 00:00:28.291 and welcome to Light On Light Through, episode 93: 00:00:28.791 --> 00:00:32.471 The Selfie and Marshall McLuhan. 00:00:33.534 --> 00:00:43.760 Well, you might ask how and what did Marshall McLuhan, who left this earth in 1980, 00:00:44.851 --> 00:00:47.537 what did he have to say about the selfie, 00:00:47.953 --> 00:00:52.935 which of course didn't even exist until just a few years ago. 00:00:54.163 --> 00:00:57.194 The answer, I think, is very interesting. 00:00:57.194 --> 00:01:01.701 One of the real joys about understanding McLuhan 00:01:02.167 --> 00:01:07.935 is how what he wrote in the 50's, the 60's and the 1970's 00:01:08.717 --> 00:01:11.860 so accurately predicted 00:01:12.503 --> 00:01:17.674 what our communications and media are doing today. 00:01:18.384 --> 00:01:26.312 And even better than that in some ways, is the way that some people who have read McLuhan 00:01:27.049 --> 00:01:35.459 compound insights, just in their everyday lives, when they realize that hey, this is something 00:01:35.459 --> 00:01:40.194 that McLuhan might have actually been talking about, 00:01:40.194 --> 00:01:48.045 and something that McLuhan's ideas can help us understand and explain 00:01:48.644 --> 00:01:53.606 in hopefully a unique and valuable way. 00:01:54.328 --> 00:01:58.416 So, here is one of my favorite examples: 00:01:58.416 --> 00:02:04.253 a true story, something that happened to me about 5 or 6 months ago. 00:02:04.744 --> 00:02:06.841 I actually wrote a blog post about it. 00:02:06.841 --> 00:02:12.531 Now I'm finally getting around to doing a podcast episode about this. 00:02:13.847 --> 00:02:19.137 I posted a photo on Twitter, of Marshall McLuhan, 00:02:19.596 --> 00:02:27.114 his son Eric McLuhan and me that was taken in the late 1970's, 00:02:27.447 --> 00:02:32.485 when I had organized a conference at Fairleigh Dickinson University, 00:02:32.485 --> 00:02:37.280 which is where I was teaching then: it's in Teaneck, New Jersey. 00:02:37.755 --> 00:02:43.918 The conference was about the Tetrad or the Laws of the Media. 00:02:44.381 --> 00:02:47.935 Now, I'll get back to that in a moment. 00:02:48.305 --> 00:02:52.382 But one of the first people to comment on the photo 00:02:53.105 --> 00:02:58.125 was a current media theorist, by the name of Ian Bogost, 00:02:58.716 --> 00:03:02.398 who said: 'Where is the fourth?' 00:03:03.504 --> 00:03:08.055 Now, in order to understand why Ian asked that question, 00:03:08.564 --> 00:03:15.300 now, I'll explain to you what the Tetrad or Laws of the Media are all about. 00:03:15.726 --> 00:03:20.489 And they go back to the mid to late 1970s 00:03:20.863 --> 00:03:27.142 when Marshall McLuhan began publishing some short articles and talking about 00:03:27.499 --> 00:03:32.692 what he was terming 'the laws of the media', or 'laws of media'. 00:03:33.363 --> 00:03:38.417 And in fact, there were four laws: hence the word 'tetrad' 00:03:38.417 --> 00:03:46.856 which is a way of saying 'four'; a triad is three, a tetrad is four. 00:03:47.757 --> 00:03:51.599 And to give you an example, you could do a tetrad 00:03:51.599 --> 00:04:00.509 or apply McLuhan's Laws of Media to radio and its impact, and how people used it. 00:04:01.331 --> 00:04:08.682 And you can begin by looking at the first consequence or effect of radio. 00:04:09.405 --> 00:04:14.360 McLuhan called this first law, this first law of the Tetrad, 00:04:14.693 --> 00:04:18.296 enhancement or amplification. 00:04:18.941 --> 00:04:25.707 And what the radio clearly does is it amplifies or enhances 00:04:26.580 --> 00:04:34.499 instant verbal, acoustic communication across long distances. 00:04:35.618 --> 00:04:41.164 The second law has to do with what the new technology or media replaces 00:04:41.164 --> 00:04:44.140 and McLuhan called this obsolescence. 00:04:45.091 --> 00:04:50.925 So, you can clearly see that one of the things that radio obsolesced 00:04:50.925 --> 00:04:57.230 was the printed word, in a variety of ways: say, newspapers. 00:04:57.623 --> 00:05:01.781 They used to be the only way that people received news. 00:05:02.136 --> 00:05:08.758 Once radio came along, in the 1920's and really began expanding in the 1930's, 00:05:09.054 --> 00:05:14.816 people increasingly began to get their news, not just from newspapers, 00:05:14.816 --> 00:05:16.955 but from radio reports. 00:05:17.553 --> 00:05:21.170 Or consider something like a sporting event. 00:05:22.115 --> 00:05:26.714 That's something where, up until the introduction of radio, 00:05:26.714 --> 00:05:32.977 people had to read about what their favorite teams did, in the newspaper: 00:05:33.543 --> 00:05:36.100 either later in the day, or the next day. 00:05:37.037 --> 00:05:42.721 But what radio did is, it also allowed people to listen to games 00:05:42.721 --> 00:05:47.420 as they were actually occurring, in real time. 00:05:48.688 --> 00:05:53.103 The third law, or third part of the tetrad, gets even more interesting, 00:05:53.103 --> 00:05:57.608 because McLuhan said that every new medium or technology 00:05:57.900 --> 00:06:00.000 first of all enhances something, 00:06:00.432 --> 00:06:05.874 second of all obsolesces or eclipses something, something else, 00:06:06.123 --> 00:06:11.288 and third of all, retrieves some kind of communication 00:06:11.288 --> 00:06:15.232 which itself had been previously obsolesced. 00:06:15.679 --> 00:06:23.022 And so, again clearly, what radio does is it retrieves the spoken word. 00:06:23.625 --> 00:06:26.459 Now the spoken word, of course, never disappeared. 00:06:26.703 --> 00:06:31.855 So it's not as if this retrieval was digging something up 00:06:31.855 --> 00:06:33.492 which had been out of use. 00:06:33.492 --> 00:06:38.449 The spoken word continued to be important, and continues to be important right now. 00:06:38.744 --> 00:06:41.189 That's the way it has been throughout human history. 00:06:41.600 --> 00:06:46.239 But there's also no doubt that what the written word did 00:06:46.718 --> 00:06:54.157 is, to some extent in some cases, take emphasis away from the spoken word. 00:06:54.608 --> 00:06:59.316 For example, once upon a time, the spoken word was 00:06:59.316 --> 00:07:05.256 a more important commitment, in a contractual, legal sense, 00:07:05.506 --> 00:07:07.381 than the written word. 00:07:07.779 --> 00:07:11.351 But after the printing press, for a variety of reasons, 00:07:11.884 --> 00:07:18.851 the written word became legally much more binding than the spoken word. 00:07:19.232 --> 00:07:24.238 So radio obviously retrieves the spoken word. 00:07:24.899 --> 00:07:30.266 Now, in some ways, the fourth law of the Tetrad, 00:07:30.266 --> 00:07:35.086 or the fourth law in MacLuhan's Laws of Media 00:07:35.086 --> 00:07:38.972 I think is probably the most interesting and fascinating, 00:07:38.972 --> 00:07:45.881 because McLuhan said that eventually, when a medium is pushed to its limits, 00:07:46.638 --> 00:07:51.674 meaning that it can't do any more as that media, 00:07:52.589 --> 00:07:58.199 at that point, it flips into something else. 00:07:59.057 --> 00:08:01.436 And again, if you look at the history of radio, 00:08:01.436 --> 00:08:04.177 what happened with radio eventually? 00:08:04.607 --> 00:08:09.332 Well, by the end of the 1940's, radio flipped into television, 00:08:10.086 --> 00:08:12.429 which has a lot of similarities to radio: 00:08:12.429 --> 00:08:14.835 it's broadcast, it could be live, 00:08:16.216 --> 00:08:21.267 but it's very different from radio, because you have a visual component. 00:08:21.516 --> 00:08:28.764 And in a way, what television does is, it retrieves the visual component 00:08:28.764 --> 00:08:32.349 that radio had formerly obsolesced. 00:08:32.771 --> 00:08:35.929 Now, one of the nice things of the Tetrad is, you can apply it 00:08:35.929 --> 00:08:40.505 to many different threads of media evolution. 00:08:40.505 --> 00:08:45.317 And that's something that I've been doing ever since I first wrote the preface 00:08:45.594 --> 00:08:49.992 to the publication of McLuhan's 'Laws of the Media' 00:08:49.992 --> 00:08:54.511 back in 1977, in Etcetera magazine, 00:08:54.511 --> 00:08:59.551 and I did that when I was actually a Ph.D. student at New York University. 00:09:00.413 --> 00:09:03.257 But one of the things that didn't exist back then 00:09:03.863 --> 00:09:07.945 was what you're listening to right now: the podcast. 00:09:08.236 --> 00:09:12.845 And so, one of the things that radio verses into is the podcast. 00:09:13.155 --> 00:09:17.024 Like television, the podcast has similarities with radio. 00:09:17.593 --> 00:09:20.124 It's the spoken word, it's sound. 00:09:20.451 --> 00:09:24.187 But unlike radio, anybody can do a podcast. 00:09:24.840 --> 00:09:26.939 I'm a professor, I'm an author, 00:09:26.939 --> 00:09:32.691 but I certainly have no radio professional experience. 00:09:32.691 --> 00:09:36.889 I've been on a few radio shows: actually, probably dozens over the years, 00:09:36.889 --> 00:09:39.392 but I've never had my own radio show. 00:09:40.309 --> 00:09:45.638 I'm not a professional, I'm not considered a professional in the radio business. 00:09:45.910 --> 00:09:50.422 But that doesn't matter, because anybody can do a podcast. 00:09:50.759 --> 00:09:58.618 So, one of the things that radio has recently flipped into is the podcast. 00:09:59.171 --> 00:10:03.679 So, now let's go back to what Ian Bogost was asking 00:10:03.679 --> 00:10:09.683 when I posted this photo of Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan and me, 00:10:10.013 --> 00:10:14.546 taken at the conference at Fairleigh Dickinson University 00:10:14.546 --> 00:10:23.673 where we were considering the Tetrad and the Laws of Media, back in 1977. 00:10:25.585 --> 00:10:30.563 Well, why was Ian Bogost saying "Where is the fourth?"? 00:10:30.563 --> 00:10:36.314 He was talking about the Tetrad having four parts 00:10:36.314 --> 00:10:39.607 and he only saw three people in the photograph. 00:10:39.992 --> 00:10:42.277 So that was a pretty clever question. 00:10:43.015 --> 00:10:46.306 But as soon as I read that question on Twitter, 00:10:46.885 --> 00:10:49.965 the answer popped into my head immediately. 00:10:50.820 --> 00:10:54.864 The fourth in that photograph is the selfie. 00:10:55.501 --> 00:11:00.138 Now, actually, somebody else, Mary-Lou Bale, one of my students 00:11:00.138 --> 00:11:01.502 took that photograph. 00:11:02.274 --> 00:11:10.651 But nowadays, you can clearly see that the photograph has flipped into the selfie. 00:11:10.651 --> 00:11:13.286 So let's do a Tetrad for the photograph. 00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:16.967 What does it enhance or amplify? 00:11:17.244 --> 00:11:22.900 Well, capturing the visual world as it actually is. 00:11:23.909 --> 00:11:29.378 And that clearly points at what the photograph obsolesces: the painting, 00:11:30.017 --> 00:11:35.993 in which what is on the painting is dependent on the talent of the painter, 00:11:36.429 --> 00:11:41.322 in contrast to the photograph, where the photographer has to have some talent 00:11:41.790 --> 00:11:45.942 but the essence of the photograph is just the purely 00:11:45.942 --> 00:11:50.522 -- originally, photo-chemical process -- now digital process 00:11:50.522 --> 00:11:56.482 in which the light bounces off the real world or whatever you are taking a photograph of, 00:11:56.727 --> 00:11:59.234 and you then have a photograph. 00:11:59.729 --> 00:12:07.680 So the painter, the pen-and-ink sketcher, is obsolesced by the photograph 00:12:07.680 --> 00:12:09.227 and by the photographer. 00:12:10.128 --> 00:12:14.171 Well, what does the photograph and the photographer retrieve, 00:12:14.171 --> 00:12:16.077 which had been previously lost? 00:12:16.462 --> 00:12:19.131 Well, you can look into a pool of water. 00:12:19.566 --> 00:12:26.178 And in fact, McLuhan talked about this when he talked about the Greek myth of Narcisus 00:12:26.568 --> 00:12:32.279 who stared at his reflection in a crystal-clear pool of water. 00:12:32.689 --> 00:12:36.994 That's in effect what a photograph is retrieving, 00:12:36.994 --> 00:12:43.653 because that's not an artist's interpretation, that's an actual reflection of the world. 00:12:44.191 --> 00:12:45.784 And so, we get to the end: 00:12:45.784 --> 00:12:51.226 What does the photograph, let's even say, the still photograph, 00:12:51.226 --> 00:12:53.006 what does it flip into? 00:12:53.006 --> 00:12:55.949 Well, over the years, it has flipped into many things. 00:12:56.508 --> 00:12:58.859 It's flipped into motion pictures, 00:12:59.545 --> 00:13:05.202 it's flipped into the Kodak photograph which could be taken by anyone: 00:13:05.405 --> 00:13:09.274 the first photographs were only taken by professional photographers. 00:13:10.265 --> 00:13:14.545 It's flipped into the polaroid, which is an instant photograph. 00:13:15.259 --> 00:13:18.749 And of course, it's flipped very recently into the photographs 00:13:18.749 --> 00:13:21.368 that we all take with our phones. 00:13:21.681 --> 00:13:28.670 But I think the selfie most epitomizes what the photograph has currently flipped into. 00:13:29.362 --> 00:13:34.603 Because as we all know, millions of photographs are now taken by simply pointing 00:13:34.936 --> 00:13:40.512 the camera in our smart phone at ourselves. 00:13:41.293 --> 00:13:47.734 And so, that's what the photographer, I think, has flipped into. 00:13:48.625 --> 00:13:57.189 Anyway, you can read more about McLuhan and the Tetrad in many places. 00:13:57.189 --> 00:13:59.077 I'll recommend one of my books, 00:13:59.077 --> 00:14:04.231 "Digital McLuhan - a Guide to the Information Millennium" 00:14:04.231 --> 00:14:08.204 which I wrote back in 1999. 00:14:08.837 --> 00:14:12.581 You'll find a link to that on the podcast page, 00:14:13.991 --> 00:14:24.307 which is lightonlightthrough.com. 00:14:25.432 --> 00:14:30.959 And by the way, Light On Light Through is a term I also got from McLuhan. 00:14:32.563 --> 00:14:39.771 So, if you ever have a chance, read not only my books and other books about McLuhan 00:14:39.771 --> 00:14:43.595 but read some of McLuhan's original works themselves. 00:14:44.433 --> 00:14:46.859 Some people find them a little hard to get into, 00:14:46.859 --> 00:14:54.613 but if you give them some time, you'll be rewarded by a cornucopia of insights 00:14:55.077 --> 00:15:04.500 and tools that we can use to help make sense of our rapidly evolving media age. 00:15:05.066 --> 00:15:07.216 (Female voice) The Light On Light Through podcast 00:15:07.535 --> 00:16:18.745 (Music and announcements) 00:16:18.746 --> 00:16:44.704 (Outro jingle)