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.
PostScript: Do read this 2012 paper:
Sandstrom, Gregory.2012. "Laws of Media -- The Four Effects: A McLuhan Contribution to Social Epistemology" Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (12): 1-6
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