Image: Wikimedia Commons · Photo: Bernard Gotfyd Mind games for the digital age, from satellites and booze to tactile space During the course of collecting thematic data for my dissertation* on corporate designing religion (Wiseman, 2023) I experimented with McLuhans’ Tetrad theory. McLuhans’ in the plural refers to the fact that Marshall’s work on the Tetrad in Laws of Media: The New Science, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1988, was published after Marshall McLuhan’s (1911-1980) death as a joint-authorship venture with his son Eric McLuhan (1942-2018). Marshall McLuhan is synonymous with his landmark publication, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), which is still seen as obligatory reading for students of communication studies. The Tetrad model provides a particularly intriguing mind game to assess changing phenomena. The assessment is divided into four potentially advantageous and disadvantageous features, that which enhances, that which retrieves, that which obsoletes and that which reverses. The philosophic presentation of specific phenomena in the McLuhans’ book reminds the reader of the once popular concrete poetry. The phenomena chosen included, among others, satellites, cars, booze, hermeneutics and tactile space. The McLuhans' Tetrad applied to digital media and to digital, religious substitutes during the Covid pandemic · Infographic: © Graham Wiseman
Using the McLuhans’ model for the phenomena of digital media and religious institutions in my dissertation research was perhaps only a source of limited insight, yet it did demand an insightful simplification, reducing the advantages/disadvantages to essential analytic claims. Perhaps Marshall McLuhan’s theory of Gutenberg and electronic media as the axial era intersections of externalised memory technologies, could be extended to define a new phase in human communication: The Post-McLuhan Digital Galaxy? Try taking a phenomenon, such as AI or E-cars, to propose your opinions in the McLuhan’s four categories of phenomena enhancement, retrieval obsoletion and reversal. *The print version of the dissertation, Corporate Designing Religion: Transforming the Visual Identities of Religious Institutions in the Digital Era containing the infographics, was published by Lit Verlag (Münster, Berlin, Vienna und Zürich) in October 2023. © Graham Wiseman (02. 01. 2024) McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy : the making of typographic man. University of Toronto Press. McLuhan, M., & McLuhan, E. (1988). Laws of Media : The New Science. University of Toronto Press. Wiseman, G. (2023). Corporate Designing Religion: Transforming the Visual Identities of Religious Institutions in the Digital Era (Vol. Bd. 3). Lit Verlag.
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