Title

Tetrad of Media Effects

Description

Every human artifact is a medium of communication whose message may be said to be the totality of the satisfactions and dissatisfactions it engenders which, at the speed of light, reveal simultaneous process patterns. To arrive at this set of process patterns, one asks the questions:

1. What does any artifact enlarge or enhance?
2. What does it erode or obsolesce?
3. What does it retrieve that had been earlier obsolesced?
4. What does it reverse or flip into when pushed to the limits of its potential (chiasmus)?

As framed, the tetradic metaphor amplifies the potential equilibrium of the relations being explored; it obsolesces simile, metonymy, and connected logic; it retrieves understanding, or meaning, by virtue of replay in another mode; and it reverses into allegory or parallelism (see [the figure]).

...As such, the tetrad performs the function of myth in that it compresses past, present, and future into one through the power of simultaneity. The tetrad illumines the borderline between acoustic and visual space as an arena of spiraling repetition and replay, both of input and feedback, interlace and interface in the area of an imploded circle of rebirth and metamorphosis.

Designer

McLuhan, Marshall

Date

1989

Source

"The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century"

Bibliographic Citation

McLuhan, M., & Powers, B. R. (1989). The global village : transformations in world life and media in the 21st century. Oxford University Press. Figure 1.1.

is depiction of attribute

English Spiral

is composed of

English Spiral

use feature

English Brace

depict things of type

English Typological or Classification

English Cyclical