Marshall McLuhan's Four Laws of Media

McLuhan, the media sociologist/guru who coined the term 'Global Village', propounded Four Laws of Media which capture a veritably spiraling dialectic -- a quaint, never-ending, forth-and-back cyle of Synthesis-Antithesis-Thesis-Synthesis -- of media technology and segmented social life.

I read the Four Laws as follows:

1. EXTENSION/AMPLIFICATION: As they come to the fore, new media technologies extend the reach of certain pre-existing capacities of Mind and aspects of Body.

2. REVERSAL/'COUNTER-DIALECTIC': All media revolutions embody the trigger or potential for reverse motion (a counter-dialectic); that is, for a step-back from the gains they represent -- for a reset to a bygone era.

3. RETRIEVAL/RECURRENCE: Newly-invented media tend to resuscitate the senses, skills and/or sensibilities which the displaced technological order had dulled,'suppressed' or obscured.

4. OBSOLESCENCE: New media in effect coopt certain older modes of communication even as they declare them 'obsolete' and render them ineffective; and they do so because the latter do not allow themselves to disappear entirely, even as the impression of something altogether new takes root in the landscape.