Bogost on McLuhan

Ian Bogost with AN INTERESTING POST ON THE MCLUHAN TETRAD, including Zingone’s claim to have found a fifth media law.

The tetrad really is very important. I’ve written two articles on it already, and that’s far from the end of the subject for me.

Concerning whether or not Zingone actually discovered a fifth law to complicate the tetrad (the McLuhans searched for a long time without finding more than four)… my gut reaction is no, though I want to study the paper more closely (it had escaped my notice too, Ian).

Here’s why I think it’s not… New media, for the McLuhans, are always produced from the obsolescent rubble of old ones, in a movement “from cliché to archetype”. (This takes real ingenuity, which is why McLuhan is absolutely not a technological determinist. Even if we are silently shaped by the medium of the moment, there is no determinism as to which medium comes next; the valor of individual inventors plays a major role in that process, since the current medium can reverse into any number of possible next stages.)

In any case, my sense is that the syncretism Zingone describes is just one possible variant of the creation of new background media out of the visible figures of obsolete or obsolescing old ones. So, my first inclination is to say that it’s just one form of retrieval among others.

Kudos to Ian for using the tetrad in class. It’s tailor-made for students in many ways, and I’m surprised I’ve never used it in class.