Howard Rheingold, author of ‘Smart Mobs’ and ‘Virtual Communities’ has written a piece about what McLuhan would think of mobile communication.
Rightly, Rheingold goes beyond the usual ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ and ‘Understanding Media’ critiques of Hot and Cool Media and The Medium Is The Message that columnists usually fall back on, and refer instead to Marshall’s later work with his son Eric in the 1988 (posthumously published) ‘The Laws of Media: A New Science’, which is next to impossible to get hold of locally (just ask Bennett’s, Whitcoulls, Borders and Unity. I did.).
Rheingold unpicks mobile media using the tetrad of questions McLuhan prescribed for all media – by which he means anything from a wheel to a t-shirt to a pen to a satellite television network (in McLuhan’s world ‘media’ refers to any man-made artefact. It all has communicative power).
They are:
1) What does it enhance?
2) What does it obsolesce?
3) What does it retrieve?
4) What does it flip into?
Rheingold’s play with those questions, and his attempts at answers provide an interesting insight into the technology’s potential and limitations.
My own thesis (yes, yes… I’m doing it now) applies those same four questions to digital radio. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out the other end.
