Name: Laws of media
ISBN: 9780802077158

Laws of media

Laws of Media; The New Science started as an anticipated 2nd edition to Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In this book the "Laws" are four principles discussed in Understanding Media, used here as a set of four questions to query any artifact created by humans, including theory, procedures, and style. These can also be viewed as four perspectives or dimensions of such an artifact. The four dimensions are referenced in the book as the "tetrad." About eighty pages of the book are devoted to examples of artifacts tested as tetrads. The examples—laid out, per Eric, as poetic stanzas, without further elaboration—can confuse the reader's newly minted understanding of the tetrad; however, one does not need to understand the examples to gain insights from the book, a collaboration between Marshall McLuhan and his son, Eric McLuhan. --F.A. Moore

What Hacker News says

_deliriumJan 2011

I've read a book by Niel Postman where he points out that the medium your working in changes how you craft a message. I believe he was right in stating that a text-based medium promotes reasoning to a greater degree.

I think Marshall McLuhan's views on this are worth revisiting as well, though he's currently a bit out of favor among media-studies and communications-studies folks. He's admittedly a bit extreme in parts (he seems to sometimes really believe that the "medium is the message"), but there's a lot of good stuff in Laws of Media on how different technical choices for representing and conveying information will structure and influence the information that's conveyed, as opposed to being mere implementation details.

thread

brokentoneNov 2015

Marshall and Eric McLuhan's Laws of media address the technological impact of the latin letter, and how it was extended to other technology. http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Media-Science-Marshall-McLuhan/dp...

Marshall McLuhan's book The Gutenberg Galaxy is a longer approach to specific conversation around how latin characters led to the printing press which transformed society into the industrial age:

http://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/1...

thread