Week #3 Assignment #3

Marshall McLuhan tetrad asks these four question of a an object of the media.

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?

1. What does the medium enhance?

I am going to use Facebook as my medium. We have to ask, what does this enhance? I believe it enhances communication. to many different people in one place.

What does the medium make obsolete?

I believe it makes having to contact many people individually obsolete. 

What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?

The difficulty of connecting with family and friends. You can connect with people at the touch of a button.

What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

I believe it flips into a device to for people to access your information and intimate details about your life and family. You could involve people into your life you may not have wanted to.

Marshall McLuhan's theories really come down to market analysis to me. There are people that do this in every industry. They ask the questions: What's the next big thing? How can we utilize it? How will people accept this medium? It's really simple evolution. First people would write letters, then they called eachother, then they e-mailed,  and now people can text message. It seems like it's really just trend prediction. 

The mediums used and how people respond to them, may just be what is most popular. For example, if you were watching TV and the news said that a famous singer died, you would want to check the facts on the internet. Years ago people would rely on the news of their local papers and news. Now we have access to millions of articles. If a year from now something greater than the internet came out and began to evolve into what people use as their main resource for information, we would use that rather than the internet, because that is how the technology has evolved. I think in social media marketing, you have to try to predict what would be the best media for getting a message across and if it will still useful months from now.