Blog Post #3 Reflection on McLuhan’s Tetrad Wikki Task

I guess Marshal McLuhan had a good foresight about what technology would bring into our life. Before we even think about what the new technologies are, he achieves to examine carefully how different technological innovations alter our world with their positive and negative consequences. I have to admit that his tetrad has helped me a lot in questioning the advantages and disadvantages of today’s innovations.

After having completed the wikki task, one point has caught my attention. When we apply McLuhan’s tetrad questions to the innovations of Horizon Report, mobile phones, social computing, educational gaming, personal broadcasting…, I have noticed that almost in all of them, “what does it make obsolete?” question gets the same answer. The answer is that all of these innovations make the actual personal interaction obsolete. The real social interaction between people shifted to virtual interactions by the use of phones, broadcasts, web discussions... Face to face conversations are becoming less and less popular and I believe that, unfortunately, this would lead to an increase in misunderstandings as well as causing distances in personal relationships. Instead of maintaining the warmness of actual meetings, we are getting ourselves stuck in a chair, looking at a screen for many hours and trying to create a warm dialog from an artificial one. I believe that we should realize the importance of actual social relationships, understand how badly the virtual communication can affect the socialization of human beings. It becomes very scary to me when I imagine that our next generations would not experience the real social gatherings or friendships that we have, today. Thus, we should prevent over-using these innovations. For instance, if we live close to our friends, we should find time to meet our friends in a café, rather than just simply calling them on the phone or always meeting them online. This would keep our relations much more healthy.

I must also add that the over-use of innovations such as TV, computer games or internet… prevent us from spending our time to more beneficial things. Larry Press (1995), in “McLuhan Meets the Net”, suggests that the more we spend time with these innovations, the less time we have for our families, neighbors, colleagues. I believe that if we over-use these tools, they can capture us and direct us and in a sense shape us as McLuhan says. Therefore, everyone should question the innovations and figure out the negative consequences of them, before letting them to shape us.

References

Horizon Report (2006, May). Retrieved September 24, 2006, from http://ci.lehigh.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_9590_1

Press, Larry. (1995). McLuhan meets the Net. [Electronic version]. Association for Computing Machinery of the ACM, 38(7), 15-20.

The Medium is the Massage (2006, May). Retrieved September 20, 2006, from http://ci.lehigh.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_9590_1