[Note from William Osborn: Here is an example post from last year's blog. This is not my reproduction or my edited memory of an old post; this is the real deal, in all its glory, complete with grammar errors, choppy style, and other wonderful things. This note continues after the post.]

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman makes numerous references to an English professor by the name of Marshall McLuhan, a "prophesier" (The Medium Is the Metaphor) and a mentor. The way Postman speaks of McLuhan led me to believe that the he was held in the highest respect by the author, and I wanted to explore this relationship further: who was this character? What were his ideas on media discourse? How did his ideas influence Neil Postman? So I began to research.

Cut to the present: McLuhan was a very controversial figure, as his future pupil Neil Postman would become; he had written many books on media, communications, and public discourse. He also coined the phrase “the media is the message,” which postman altered in his own book. What caught my eye, though, was a portion of a book titled Laws of Media, which was published after his death in the year 1988. The book deals with a concept of media by creating what is called a “Tetrad of Media Effects.” This Tetrad is a figure that organizes and displays the effects of a type of media (say, print or radio) simultaneously, and in a visual format. The figure consists of a center diamond, where the type of media is displayed. Around this are four other diamonds, completing the tetrad format, which display specific qualities of the media shown. What goes in the boxes is decided by four questions, one for each box:

1) What does the medium enhance?

2) What does the medium make obsolete?

3) What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?

4) What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

These questions and the answer to each of them form the tetrad. I thought it was a great tool, and it picked my interest. But, I could not find any tetrad of the kind Postman would more than likely have visualized: one of electronic media. So, I made my own. I couldn’t make it on the computer, so I drew it up and answered the questions. Here is what I came up with:

1) What does the medium enhance? Electronic media enhances many things, such as communications (i.e., news, entertainment, advertisements, etc) with visual imagery. Television relies on visual imagery to sell itself.

2) What does the medium make obsolete? It makes nearly all media obsolete because it presents everything in images. Print and words are replaced my images, speech is controlled, and sounds are changed to work with the visuals presented.

3) What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier? Electronic media does return sound as a media, as it was in the time of radios and spoken word, but it does this in a controlled fashion. For example, the audio is only present to accompany the visuals; when separated, the sounds become meaningless

4) What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes? This was a tough one: what can the electronic “show business” media transform into when it becomes even more used than it is now? I see a type of more controlling media, catered to individuals, but with the intent of controlling thought more outright; a kind of system you would see in a science fiction novel (for example, the emotion-setter in Philip K. Dick’s ­Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?).

So there it is. I imagine it would be more impressive in the tetradal visual form, but this is what I came up with. If you want to see what it is as a whole system, draw one out on a piece of paper and write what you think in each diamond, according to the questions given by McLuhan. But while that is a nice idea, an even better one would be to write what you think and then comment back on this post with your ideas. I would love to see what you all think because my ideas alone leave little room for learning. So go for it! Let me know what you think about it all.

Here’s a link to the Wiki article on the Tetrad and it will lead you to an article on Marshall McLuhan, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrad_of_media_effects

[Note continued: That's an example of what you should be producing on this blog. Make some insights, do a little research, and call out for the ideas of others. Rhetoric deals with the characteristics of writing. And while your opinions are certainly important, what is more relevant is your ideas and your understanding of what you are reading. Put those things in your posts; instead of criticizing the action of the book, look into what the author is doing with that action. What points are being made? How are those points being made? Make inferences. Read with two eyes: one looking at the story, one searching beneath the words for meaning and structure. Trust me on this one.

And I left the mistakes in there to point out one thing: don't worry about making everything perfect; make some mistakes. You are in the learning process. Create errors and learn from them.]