McLuhan in An Age of Social Media

Just written last Thursday - already #1 on
Amazon Computers and Technology Top 100

last updated 22 November 2016



This essay can be considered a new chapter in my book Digital McLuhan, published in 1999, or before the advent of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the social media of our age. Marshall McLuhan's ideas, including hot and cool, the medium is the message, and the tetrad, are applied to help us understand selfies, tweeting, iconic television shows such as The Sopranos and Mad Men, the Arab Spring, the U.S. Presidential election of 2016, and the Kindle revolution itself.

Photography Flips into Snapchat

One of the joys of understanding McLuhan is how his insights can leap forth at unexpected times to supply us with a connection or a new insight about a matter - or medium - at hand.  About six months ago, I came to realize that the photograph has flipped into the selfie in our own day and age.  Just yesterday, I did a little podcast on this subject - in which I also pointed out that radio has flipped into the podcast. And today, just a few hours ago, I realized that photograph has also flipped into Snapchat.

One of the best things about McLuhan's tetrad or four laws of media is that a given medium can enhance, obsolesce, retrieve, and flip into multiple media.  In case you'd like a quick refresher on the tetrad, it is an exploratory tool that McLuhan developed to help us make sense out of the emergence of media.   Take radio, for example:  It (1) enhances or amplifies sound (speech, music, etc) sent instantly across great distances simultaneously to lots of people; (2) obsolesces the written word as in newspapers as a mode of news delivery; (3) retrieves the spoken word that of course never really went away but was eclipsed to some extent by the products of the printing press; and radio, when it is pushed to its limits, (4) flips into television, which broadcasts like radio but re-inserts the visual into the mix.   And, radio, the professional mass medium, also flips into podcasting that anyone with a microphone and a connection to the Internet can do.    More on the tetrad in my book, Digital McLuhan, pictured below.

But back to photography: its flip into Snapchat is profound indeed, because permanency has always been one of photography's hallmarks.  As Andre Bazin so aptly noted, a photograph rescues an image from "its proper corruption in time".  In contrast, the Snapchat photo is deliberately intended to corrupt over time - and very quickly.  Because the essence of Snapchat is that you send someone a photograph that you want him or her to see only when they receive it, and not any time after.  If only former Congressman Anthony Weiner had known about Snapchat!

So we can now add Snapchat to the selfie as one of the media that photography has flipped into.   Like a reflection in a pool of water, which can also be a selfie and also can disappear as soon as the person staring into the pool walks away, Snapchat epitomizes the ever percolating evolution of media to forms that are at once both new and well established in our past.

See also Marshall McLuhan and the Kindle and Tetrad on Eyeglasses Flipping into Google Glass 

                               the spoken word
     McLuhan and the Kindle          |     McLuhan and the Selfie

Tetrad on the Selfie

I just had an exchange with Ian Bogost over on Twitter, after I posted the above photograph of me, Marshall McLuhan, and Eric McLuhan, taken at the "Tetrad Conference" I organized at Fairleigh Dickinson University in March 1978.

Ian aptly said that I needed a "4th" (the "tetrad" has four components).

I replied that the 4th person pertaining to the photograph was the photographer*, which has flipped into the selfie.

Here, then, is a full tetrad on the photograph, and it's flipping into the selfie:

The photograph enhances capture of literal images.

The photograph obsolesces portrait painting.

The photograph retrieves memory, looking at images in pools of water, etc.

And the photograph flips into the selfie.

And it's a physical flip of the camera in the phone, as well as a philosophic flip.

*photographer was my student, Mary Lou Bale

For more on the tetrad ...

Vanity Shelfie

I was delighted to read in the Guardian about the new trend in "shelfies" - that is, photographs not of yourself, but your bookshelf.  In my case, I have so many books that it would take me most of a day nonstop to photograph all of them.  So, in the interest of both modesty and immodesty, I confined myself to photographing just shelves with books written by me - novels and nonfiction - as well as books with my stories and essays.   A selfie + shelfie = a vanity shelfie.

Even that proved too much for the cool pic stitch app I downloaded, which provides a template for at most four horizontal photos.  I have five shelves with my books.  So what you'll see below is a my vanity shelfie of 4 out of 5.  I may at some point put in a shelfie for the mysterious 5th shelf, or wait until I get another shelf or two.

If you click on the shelfie, you'll be taken directly to my Amazon book shelf, where you can buy most of the books in the shelfie - not the foreign translations on the third shelf - and Kindle editions of most of my novels and some of my nonfiction books, as well.   And, in the holiday spirit, here's a page with freebies from my fiction and nonfiction, as well as my music.   Enjoy!