Laws of (New) Media
A guest post from Andrew McLuhan
Today I’m delighted to welcome Andrew McLuhan to the a16z newsletter as a guest author. Andrew is Marshall McLuhan’s grandson, and has a fascinating story to share that’s equal parts family history and media theory. For more on New Media theory, you can catch up on yesterday’s piece here, and be sure to follow Andrew on X. -AD
Are there any general principles of technology, attributes and effects common to all products of human innovation, to all of these artificial extensions of ourselves? These were among questions Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric McLuhan set out to find and answer in the early 1970s.
The ‘tetrad’ or ‘laws of media:’
enhances: awareness of inclusive, structural process
obsolesces: dominance of logical method
reverses into: technology (hardware) becomes software
retrieves: metaphor, logos
‘Laws of Media: The New Science’ (Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 1988)
McLuhan Sr. had been approached by publisher McGraw-Hill to do a 10th anniversary edition of his best-selling 1964 work ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’ I think they wanted a new introduction, maybe an extra chapter or two to examine technologies which had come on the scene in the years since Understanding Media. And at first, I think this is what Marshall and Eric set their sights on, as notes in their copies of Understanding Media suggest. They referred to this project as UMR, or ‘Understanding Media Revised,’ and even at that point it was more than the publishers had asked for. It became much more.
McLuhan ignored or defied the apparent rule that no book can be more than 10% new, as he pointed out in the 1964 introduction to Understanding Media:
“Some of the principal extensions, together with some of their psychic and social consequences, are studied in this book. Just how little consideration has been given to such matters in the past can be gathered from the consternation of one of the editors of this book. He noted in dismay that “seventy-five per cent of your material is new. A successful book cannot venture to be more than ten per cent new.” Such a risk seems quite worth taking at the present time when the stakes are very high, and the need to understand the effects of the extensions of man becomes more urgent by the hour.”
Despite the apparently excessive novelty, the book became a bestseller; and if studying media was “more urgent by the hour” in 1964, it’s hard to describe the level of urgency we’re at today.
UMR made a departure when Marshall decided to address one of the big criticisms of Understanding Media, namely that it wasn’t ‘scientific.’ The ‘unscientific’ accusation was more a comment on the style rather than the substance of the book. The style was deliberately unconventional, meant to reflect more the media of the day than the form of yesterday. To the highly literate it appeared confused and without structure. It was anything but. The style, more like poetry than prose, was deliberately employed to involve the reader, to force them to be more active than passive.
I can imagine Marshall and Eric, father and son, talking it out. They were so attuned, they would practically finish each other’s sentences at times. “We have laws of physics, of thermodynamics… what about laws of media?” They decided to look into it, using Understanding Media as their research material.
Evidence of Marshall and Eric’s efforts is seen the pages of the two copies of Understanding Media they studied together, each making notes in their copies. UMR, the project of revising Understanding Media, was unfortunately abandoned (abandoned but the manuscripts show a lot of work was done) but that didn’t stop the McLuhans from their search for laws of media, ultimately with the result that Eric McLuhan would write:
“We found that everything man makes and does, every process, every style, every artefact, every poem, song, painting, gimmick, gadget, theory, technology — every product of human effort — manifested the same four dimensions.”
‘Laws of Media: The New Science,’ University of Toronto Press, 1988
If we were to pause for a moment to consider what a medium is, the above goes a long way toward answering that question. How often do we even consider that basic question: what is a medium? What are media? We focus so often on this or that technology we rarely seem to consider them together. Considering them together, seeking their commonalities, actually leads us quite naturally to discovering their general principles.
Toward the end of his life, a life which ended before his 70th birthday, Avant Garde magazine asked Marshall McLuhan what he considered his greatest achievement. His reply?
“I consider my greatest achievement is the discovery that all human artifacts, all the extensions of man, are patterned structurally in the mode of the word. Whether it is a medium like radio, a bull dozer, or a safety pin; whether it is the word or a law of science, all these utterings and outerings of man have a four-part structure which is that of metaphor itself. I will illustrate this discovery from the character of money, which:
(a) enhances the speed of exchange
(b) obsolesces barter
(c) retrieves potlatch (conspicuous waste) and
(d) when pushed to its limits, flips or reverses its character into credit.
A book of these things is due to appear, title ‘The Laws of the Media.’”
But no one was interested in publishing it. It wasn’t published until 1988 when Eric McLuhan finally got someone – University of Toronto Press – to put it out as ‘Laws of Media: The New Science.’ The subtitle was a deliberate nod to Francis Bacon (Novum Organon) and Giambattista Vico (Scienza Nuova) of which tradition the McLuhans felt their work was part.
I have noticed more people using the laws of media, or the ‘tetrad’ (group of four) as it’s called, lately.
The laws of media can’t tell you everything about any technology, but they give you four reliable places from which to begin to explore what any technology is and what it does – another way of saying ‘the medium is the message.’ Particularly, it’s a way of examining the form of a thing and not just its content. The content of a medium, what we do with it, pay attention to, is always both the smaller part of the situation, and the less affective area. In Understanding Media McLuhan brilliantly paraphrases T S Eliot when he describes content as the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The content keeps us busy, hold our attention, while the media do their work rearranging us, our lives, our world. To enlist Mary Poppins, content is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
The four things the McLuhans discovered are that:
Any given technology enhances or amplifies some aspect of us. We create tools to do something we already do faster, more easily or efficiently. Gloves to save our hands. Computers, to calculate. Telephone, that our voice carries across the world.
“It is a persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ 1964
It obsolesces, it upsets or displaces, disrupts something already in a dominant position. The Linotype machine put 90% of typesetters out of work. Twitter broke the news that television and radio networks used to.
“Now today, we speak of the book as obsolete. This means the book is acquiring ever new uses in the age of Xerox and the age of paperbacks.” Marshall and Eric McLuhan in conversation, 1971
It retrieves, or brings back something from the past, however near or far, in a new form. Text messaging put a telegraph in your pocket. The man in the car, the knight in shining armour.
“What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground [medium] is brought back and inheres in the new form?” ‘Laws of Media: The New Science’ 1988
When pushed past a point, it tends to flip or reverses its utility or characteristics. A glass of wine or two can make for a good time, relieve stress, grease the social wheels. A few bottles… quite the opposite. Information assists informed, timely decisions, too much information leads to overload, paralysis.
“When pushed to the limits of its potential the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?” Laws of Media: The New Science’ 1988
For example, here’s a tetrad from Laws of Media:
Xerox:
enhances: the speed of the printing press
obsolesces: the assembly-line book
reverses into: everybody becomes a publisher
retrieves: the oral tradition
‘Laws of Media: The New Science’ (Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 1988)
While media can be complex in nature and do many things, Marshall and Eric found that all media, without exception, do these four things. As remarkable as this discovery is – so remarkable that Marshall McLuhan considered it his most impressive achievement – almost equally remarkable is that so few people know about it.
They found four things which applied in all cases, but never stopped looking for a fifth. I know my father Eric was still keeping an eye or ear out for a fifth common dimension, something that would apply without exception to all media. A few people have ventured one thing or another but they did not satisfy my father’s criteria.
Having spent the last five years leading cohorts through Understanding Media word by word cover to cover, I was also looking out; and while I found many more of what I think of as ‘minor laws,’ things which apply to classes of technologies, I haven’t found that fifth either. Maybe you will.
It takes some getting used to before you’re comfortable with the tetrad. You need curiosity. You have to be willing to play a bit, or a lot. To imagine. To be satisfied with temporary incompleteness. To argue with yourself. To test the parts against each other. To tinker. To dabble on the more poetic side of things. There’s some tuning involved to get the ‘right’ answers.
In one sense, there is no ‘right’ answer, but in another sense there is. There’s sometimes no right answer because, for example, a medium may amplify or extend more than one part of us, a new medium may make more than one existing medium obsolete. There are, however, right answers in relation to each other. Like the notes in a chord, the right notes resonate, and when they do, they reveal things. But you have to be willing to play. The right answer is also the answer which opens up areas of exploration and learning.
“I don’t explain, I explore”
Life, February 1966
Exploration is for discovering the new. Explanation is for defining something already observed. They are two very different approaches, each is appropriate to a certain activity. The key to exploration is to not be too concerned about what you will discover, because we tend to find what we’re looking for.
Not everyone is willing to experiment in this way. Many will also not consider this scientific according to their notions of what science is. The McLuhans aligned themselves with an older notion of science, the old new science. The subtitle is the clue, deliberately evoking Francis Bacon and Giambattista Vico and their works Novum Organon and Scienza Nuova.
“The laws of media in tetrad form belong properly to rhetoric and grammar, not philosophy. Our concern is etymology and exegesis. This is to place the modern study of technology and artefacts on a humanistic and linguistic basis for the first time.”
‘Laws of Media: The New Science’ 1988
The ‘laws of media’ can’t tell you everything about any medium, but it does give us something remarkable: predictability. We know that anything we can come up with will do these four things. It will amplify some part of us. It will make something obsolete. It will bring something back from the past in a new form. It will, when pushed, flip. This is an incredible advantage when it comes to new media. It gives us a real head start on being able to anticipate the effects of new forms on us and our world. These effects are not limited to ‘side effects’ but also include the more desirable financial ones.
“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
‘Saturday Review’ 1967
Making tetrads:
Allow yourself room. Try to avoid making boxes; boxes enclose and you want freedom. Put your medium in the middle and work out from there. When I’m doing this kind of work I like to get the biggest surface available. Ideally, a whiteboard or blackboard. I also like to do this with groups to get more perspectives from multiple backgrounds. (But I’ve also printed my own blank tetrad template as scratch pads and you are welcome to take this blank and print it for yourself.)
To begin with, get as many answers down as possible. Later, look at them and find answers from each of the groups which resonate with each other to refine your tetrad.
“Answers are easy; questions are hard.”
Monday Night Seminar, January 22 1977
Some people find some of the laws easier or more difficult. For me, three of them are easier than one: retrieve. With some thinking, I can work out what part of us is artificially extended in the new form, what we will use it for. It’s often not difficult to imagine what will be made obsolete, pushed aside. And with some more work we can imagine what could happen in a situation of overabundance or extreme application (and imagine if we anticipated that before it happened, and acted accordingly instead of writing these things off as ‘unintended or unforeseen consequences’?) But to know what’s being brought back from the past in a new form… well, you need to know what’s back there to be brought back. Sometimes you hit on an answer when you’re not expecting it. That’s actually my favourite time to hit on an answer, if it can be afforded. There’s nothing quite like an unexpected flash of insight.
iPhone 1:
enhances: brings the world into yourself into the world
obsolesces: the house as home
flips: the end of the individual
retrieves: the nomadic hunter
Tetradeck (prototype card deck, Andrew McLuhan)
I often use the example of the highway to demonstrate the tetrad. The highway amplifies travel, our ability to get from one place to another quickly, efficiently. Among the things made obsolete were mass commuting platforms like trains – people could travel more directly and on their own schedule – and the neighbourhood as a place to both live and work: the suburb was born. Pushed too far, with too many cars on the road at the same time, you get a traffic jam. Quite the reverse of the highway. Here is where my tetrad on the highway got hung up for quite a while. What does the highway bring back in a new form? I would use this as an illustration of how the ‘retrieve’ element can be elusive. And, it doesn’t necessarily bother me to not get all four: after all, those three things about the highway can actually spin out to a lot of productive work.
As it happens, we had a Golden Retriever named Finnegan. One winter, I was walking Finn along the dirt lane behind the house and we cross over this creek. If conditions are right, it’s a lot of fun to skate on this frozen creek in the winter. And it hit me. Before we had roads build here, rivers were our highways. Our modern highways are, in a sense, a retrieval of the river as a highway, as a mode of transportation, in a new form.
Here’s one of Marshall’s tetrads on the computer from 1978:
Computer:
Enhances: instant replay of information, SW (software)
Obsolesces: HW (hardware)
Retrieves: Hunter
Flips: pattern recognition.
“As James Joyce said of these man-made environments, when invisible, they are invincible.”
‘At the Flip Point of Time—The Point of More Return?’ 1975
The point of the tetrad, the point of media studies at all, is to make media visible. To force us to pay attention to what’s happening all around us, sometimes only slightly beneath our awareness, sometimes buried deeply underneath. The true user experience is what we don’t notice but which shapes us all the same.
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effects upon him.”
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
As he said a little later in the book, “media are ‘make happen’ agents, but not ‘make aware’ agents.” Because of this, he made it his object to make us aware, and in that effort he developed methods we might use. The tetrad or laws of media are the result of that effort, a ‘make aware’ agent. It leads me to wonder whether there might be an ideal use for artificial intelligence here, in helping bring things up to the level of awareness and maybe more within our control: make aware agents.
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