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Laws of Media: The New Science
Marshall McLuhan has been described as Canada's most exciting and original thinker, a member of the small company of intellectual geniuses this country has produced. Works such as The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride , From Cliche to Archetype , and Understanding Media have established his reputation throughout the world and have profoundly influenced our understanding of contemporary communication. In his later years McLuhan was working on a 'unified field' theory of human culture, an effort in which he collaborated with and was assisted by his son, Eric McLuhan. This book is the result of that collaboration.
The McLuhans are retrieving another way of understanding our world, a way known to some ancient Greeks (but not Aristotle), to medieval thinkers, to Francis Bacon and Giambattista Vico, and to T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in this century. It is based on the use of words and the conseuqent power of the 'logos' to shape all the elements of culture - media - with which we surround ourselves.
The authors explain how the invention of the alphabet led to the dominance of visual-space conceptualizations over those of acoustic space and its creative words (and word-plays). They consider the differences between the left- and right-hand sides of our brains, and use Gestalt theories of figure and ground to explore the underlying principles that define media.
'Media,' the word so closely connected with Marshall McLuhan's thought, is here explored in its broadest meaning, encompassing all that has been created by artefacts, information, ideas - every example of human innovation, from computer program to a tea cup, from musical arrangement to the formula for a cold remedy, from an X-ray machine to the sentence you're reading right now. All these are media to whcih can be applied the laws the McLuhans have developed.
The laws are based on a set of four questions - a tetrad - that can be applied to any artefact or
What does it enhance or intensify?
What does it render obsolete or displace?
What does it retrieve that was previoulsy obsolesced?
What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?
Inherent in every human innovation is an answer to each of the questions of this tetrad; anything that does not contain answers to these four questions is not the product of human creation.
The laws identified by the McLuhans consitute a new scientific basis for media studies, testable, and able to allow for prediction. It takes in all human activities and speech; it breaks down barriers and reconsiders them as mere intervals. In the McLuhan tradition, this New Science offers a while new understanding of human creation, and a vision that could reshape our future.
The McLuhans are retrieving another way of understanding our world, a way known to some ancient Greeks (but not Aristotle), to medieval thinkers, to Francis Bacon and Giambattista Vico, and to T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in this century. It is based on the use of words and the conseuqent power of the 'logos' to shape all the elements of culture - media - with which we surround ourselves.
The authors explain how the invention of the alphabet led to the dominance of visual-space conceptualizations over those of acoustic space and its creative words (and word-plays). They consider the differences between the left- and right-hand sides of our brains, and use Gestalt theories of figure and ground to explore the underlying principles that define media.
'Media,' the word so closely connected with Marshall McLuhan's thought, is here explored in its broadest meaning, encompassing all that has been created by artefacts, information, ideas - every example of human innovation, from computer program to a tea cup, from musical arrangement to the formula for a cold remedy, from an X-ray machine to the sentence you're reading right now. All these are media to whcih can be applied the laws the McLuhans have developed.
The laws are based on a set of four questions - a tetrad - that can be applied to any artefact or
What does it enhance or intensify?
What does it render obsolete or displace?
What does it retrieve that was previoulsy obsolesced?
What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?
Inherent in every human innovation is an answer to each of the questions of this tetrad; anything that does not contain answers to these four questions is not the product of human creation.
The laws identified by the McLuhans consitute a new scientific basis for media studies, testable, and able to allow for prediction. It takes in all human activities and speech; it breaks down barriers and reconsiders them as mere intervals. In the McLuhan tradition, this New Science offers a while new understanding of human creation, and a vision that could reshape our future.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
About the author
Marshall McLuhan
137 books981 followersHerbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.
McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 9, 2015
Laws of Media may not be McLuhan's best-known work, but it is one of his best in terms of insight and intuition. The work, based partly on scientific assumptions (e.g. the idea that we are becoming less rational and more emotional as a result of the impact of electronic media), tries to explain many of the enigmas of the life of media in the twentieth century (art, for example) in terms of the relation between the human mind and technology.
Some ideas are, I think, quite convincing, and no doubt very fascinating. His explanation of solipsism in art (and not only in art) as a misunderstanding of the new concepts of modern science and electric technology is extremely interesting.
Much as physicists had to create a new mathematics and geometry to explain new concepts in less analytical a way than they could with the old means, so artists had to resort to new, simpler ways to express a new sensibility. But they did so only towards the end of the century. Modern art, this seems to imply, was a transitional phase between the art of the "Gutenberg Age" and the new means of expression (if one may call them "art" at all) of the 21st century.
I find much less convincing the second part of the book, where McLuhan describes the life of media (all media, from the wheel to the stirrup, down to the TV set) by way of what he calls "tetrads" (groups of four concepts that describe the birth, life and obsolescence of every medium).
Some ideas are, I think, quite convincing, and no doubt very fascinating. His explanation of solipsism in art (and not only in art) as a misunderstanding of the new concepts of modern science and electric technology is extremely interesting.
Much as physicists had to create a new mathematics and geometry to explain new concepts in less analytical a way than they could with the old means, so artists had to resort to new, simpler ways to express a new sensibility. But they did so only towards the end of the century. Modern art, this seems to imply, was a transitional phase between the art of the "Gutenberg Age" and the new means of expression (if one may call them "art" at all) of the 21st century.
I find much less convincing the second part of the book, where McLuhan describes the life of media (all media, from the wheel to the stirrup, down to the TV set) by way of what he calls "tetrads" (groups of four concepts that describe the birth, life and obsolescence of every medium).
April 28, 2024
The book might be one of the most under appreciated books written in the English language. McLuhan consistently proves he’s one of the few English speakers who can decipher German and French philosophy. Like Deleuze, Proust, Benjamin, Joyce, Bergson, Baudrillard, Ponty, Beckett, Derrida and Virilio, McLuhan shows just how built into perception, language is. How the constructs of mathematics and logic require first an understanding of phonetic sense. A phenomenology of sensory extension. There were many psychologists and semiologists who had a general understanding of this but got lost when it related to technological evolution since they don’t seem to be related.
This book gets into how human perception evolved away from audio space when humans developed the meta language of language itself. A way of making the eye, the optical visual system, dominant over the phonetic sounds we evolved to communicate through. One grand political illusion. One extended simulacra.
The metaphorical representation that punctuates our logic is built into the senses and their awareness of particular characteristics and attributes of an outside of momentary self environment. An abstract thought space where we make sense of sense itself. We stack together meanings by way of common social conventionality and later on forget that these constructs are not reality itself.
This is the basis of understanding how human perception changes over time. How our science, math, language, religion and philosophy are built into it. McLuhan like the others I mentioned, can speak the language of media because he knows what it is for. A political medium of sensory information which confuses sight dominant humans by its focus on the more material “what” of its message at the expense of the “how”, “why”, and “when” of its deeper exigence.
“In his Propaganda, Jacques Ellul explains that the basic conditioning or shaping of populations is done, not by programs for various media, but by the media themselves, and by the very language that we take for granted:
'Direct propaganda, aimed at modifying opinions and attitudes, must be preceded by propaganda that is sociological in character, slow, general, seeking to create a climate, an atmosphere of favorable preliminary attitudes' (page 15). After this preparation of the ground, the whole cultural ground itself must be mobilized. not messages but the new configuration of the whole ground constitutes propaganda: 'Propaganda must be total.
The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal - the press, radio, tv, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing.
9). That is, the media themselves, and the whole cultural ground are forms of language and of what Bacon termed Idols of the Marketplace. The transforming power of language is recognized by contemporary phenomenology and linguistics as well:
Further, the usurpation of language does not merely involve the social degradation of words, nor the abuse of our listener's confidence. More pro-foundly, language inserts itself into the self-consciousness of each man as a screen that distorts him in his own eyes. The intimate being of man is in fact confused, indistinct, and multiple. Language intervenes as a power destined to expropriate us from ourselves in order to bring us into line with those around, in order to model us to the common measure of all. It defines and perfects us, it terminates and determines us. The control of consciousness it exercises makes it the accomplice of having, in its monolithic poverty, as opposed to the plurality of being. To the degree that we are forced to resort to language we renounce our interior life because language imposes the discipline of exteriority. The use of speech is thus one of the essential causes of the unhappy conscience, all the more essential because we cannot be without it. It is this which Bruce Parain has strongly emphasized:
At every moment, each consciousness destroys a littie bit of the vocabulary it has received and against which it cannot fail to revolt, because it is not its; but immediately it recreates another vocabulary in which it once again disappears.”
(Georges Gusdorf, Speaking. 42-3)
This book gets into how human perception evolved away from audio space when humans developed the meta language of language itself. A way of making the eye, the optical visual system, dominant over the phonetic sounds we evolved to communicate through. One grand political illusion. One extended simulacra.
The metaphorical representation that punctuates our logic is built into the senses and their awareness of particular characteristics and attributes of an outside of momentary self environment. An abstract thought space where we make sense of sense itself. We stack together meanings by way of common social conventionality and later on forget that these constructs are not reality itself.
This is the basis of understanding how human perception changes over time. How our science, math, language, religion and philosophy are built into it. McLuhan like the others I mentioned, can speak the language of media because he knows what it is for. A political medium of sensory information which confuses sight dominant humans by its focus on the more material “what” of its message at the expense of the “how”, “why”, and “when” of its deeper exigence.
“In his Propaganda, Jacques Ellul explains that the basic conditioning or shaping of populations is done, not by programs for various media, but by the media themselves, and by the very language that we take for granted:
'Direct propaganda, aimed at modifying opinions and attitudes, must be preceded by propaganda that is sociological in character, slow, general, seeking to create a climate, an atmosphere of favorable preliminary attitudes' (page 15). After this preparation of the ground, the whole cultural ground itself must be mobilized. not messages but the new configuration of the whole ground constitutes propaganda: 'Propaganda must be total.
The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal - the press, radio, tv, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing.
9). That is, the media themselves, and the whole cultural ground are forms of language and of what Bacon termed Idols of the Marketplace. The transforming power of language is recognized by contemporary phenomenology and linguistics as well:
Further, the usurpation of language does not merely involve the social degradation of words, nor the abuse of our listener's confidence. More pro-foundly, language inserts itself into the self-consciousness of each man as a screen that distorts him in his own eyes. The intimate being of man is in fact confused, indistinct, and multiple. Language intervenes as a power destined to expropriate us from ourselves in order to bring us into line with those around, in order to model us to the common measure of all. It defines and perfects us, it terminates and determines us. The control of consciousness it exercises makes it the accomplice of having, in its monolithic poverty, as opposed to the plurality of being. To the degree that we are forced to resort to language we renounce our interior life because language imposes the discipline of exteriority. The use of speech is thus one of the essential causes of the unhappy conscience, all the more essential because we cannot be without it. It is this which Bruce Parain has strongly emphasized:
At every moment, each consciousness destroys a littie bit of the vocabulary it has received and against which it cannot fail to revolt, because it is not its; but immediately it recreates another vocabulary in which it once again disappears.”
(Georges Gusdorf, Speaking. 42-3)
June 13, 2019
The syncretism levels are off the charts, and it's great fun so long as you get that McLuhan was no Einstein, in that the great physicist pretended, in knowing he was nearing the end of his life, neither to himself nor anyone else that he, though convinced of his own talents as he was, had finally discovered the Theory of Everything which would have served quite fittingly as capstone and farewell. Like Nietzsche, McLuhan had little compunction about inserting himself among the titans, obsolescing, at least in his own mind, reams of scholarship from all those inferior thinkers who failed to perceive the ground upon which they thought. But should we also grant him the title of Dynamite? Let's first assess the effects of his work.
If we go by academic popularity, Laws of Media was a non-starter (one might say it fizzled out) even among McLuhan's literary milieu. Did it fare any better with the public at large? Judging from the low number of ratings it has on this website, no, especially relative to the texts of Kuhn and Popper—both contemporaries, both worse publicists—who also had to push their memetic signals through in an ecology of declining literacy increasingly mediated by electronic noise. So we can safely say it had more bombast than blast.
What about the ideas themselves—do they hold water? I was glad to see, in the second sentence of the Introduction no less, the claim that "This essay offers in testable and falsifiable form (the criteria of scientific laws) observations about the structure and nature of things man makes and does," and later on, that "While empirical, [the tetrads of our science] provide a basis for prediction, for example, that retrievals or reversals of a certain form will occur." I was dismayed to see, in the remaining sections, no experiments proposed as to how a tetrad may be tested, no indication of what the criteria for a successful falsification might be, and no general or specific methods for properly determining predictive power. I do not think Popper and McLuhan would've agreed as to how the former's terms were to be construed. I think the latter took a fast-and-broad reading and asserted it multiple times with a confident tone—no substitute for qualification, so his thesis bears only the patina of science; holds no water on the terms it attributes to itself.
What about on other terms? Can the tetrad at least be incisive as a mode of conceptual analysis? Yes, I think, if we take for example "Hermeneutics" (page 140), which does enhance clarity, does retrieve depth, does reverse into obscurity when done to excess, and does bury naivete; each sense in which hermeneutics performs these actions is easily seen, that is, pattern-matched to prior experience (though this is insufficient to render its tetrad scientific; only descriptively resonant). If we take, however, "Booze" (144), which apparently enhances "private outlook, energy and zest, aggressiveness," we can add to our "Yes" a "but not necessarily." Nobody needs reminding that alcohol is more commonly categorized as a "depressant," or that only a select proportion of drinkers becomes more aggressive; and if by "private outlook" is meant "interiority of introspection," I suspect this mostly applies to a special tiny class of littérateur which does not drink to forget or to socialize.
Why the credit card should obsolesce "money" (as opposed to "paper cash") is a mystery to me, as is why Aristotelian Causality intensifies into Formal Cause in particular. How the car obsoletes the horse-and-buggy is apparent, but how "Crowd" obsoletes "the individual, private identity" is not. Specifically, though it may be true that one "loses oneself" while part of a crowd or mob, that crowds exist does not obsolesce private identity in anywhere close to the way that that cars exist obsolesces horses. And here obsolesce takes on two similar-but-orthogonal entendres, which is about as kosher as saying the written word and the telescope both "extend the eye" (117). Whether this is multimodal 4-D analysis or sloppy sense conflation I'll leave you to judge, but I at least felt like saying "That's a stretch" to many of the attributions made herein; anyone can take a concept, find the loosest interpretation still applicable as metaphor for another concept, and claim connection. So hermeneutics also intensifies into apophenia, you see.
A couple last notes. Firstly, the final sentence "Else we will have no more control of this technology and environment than we have of the wind and the tides" posits control as a sort of telos for the New Science and as a self-evident desideratum. Why should it be? I have my own answers, but a chance to compare and contrast would've been nice. Secondly, if we do decide to take his claim to place at face, McLuhan is still very, very obviously the third in a sequence of Bacon, Vico, McLuhan… Who is be the fourth grammarian? Whose tetrad shall complete the tetrad of tetrads?
If we go by academic popularity, Laws of Media was a non-starter (one might say it fizzled out) even among McLuhan's literary milieu. Did it fare any better with the public at large? Judging from the low number of ratings it has on this website, no, especially relative to the texts of Kuhn and Popper—both contemporaries, both worse publicists—who also had to push their memetic signals through in an ecology of declining literacy increasingly mediated by electronic noise. So we can safely say it had more bombast than blast.
What about the ideas themselves—do they hold water? I was glad to see, in the second sentence of the Introduction no less, the claim that "This essay offers in testable and falsifiable form (the criteria of scientific laws) observations about the structure and nature of things man makes and does," and later on, that "While empirical, [the tetrads of our science] provide a basis for prediction, for example, that retrievals or reversals of a certain form will occur." I was dismayed to see, in the remaining sections, no experiments proposed as to how a tetrad may be tested, no indication of what the criteria for a successful falsification might be, and no general or specific methods for properly determining predictive power. I do not think Popper and McLuhan would've agreed as to how the former's terms were to be construed. I think the latter took a fast-and-broad reading and asserted it multiple times with a confident tone—no substitute for qualification, so his thesis bears only the patina of science; holds no water on the terms it attributes to itself.
What about on other terms? Can the tetrad at least be incisive as a mode of conceptual analysis? Yes, I think, if we take for example "Hermeneutics" (page 140), which does enhance clarity, does retrieve depth, does reverse into obscurity when done to excess, and does bury naivete; each sense in which hermeneutics performs these actions is easily seen, that is, pattern-matched to prior experience (though this is insufficient to render its tetrad scientific; only descriptively resonant). If we take, however, "Booze" (144), which apparently enhances "private outlook, energy and zest, aggressiveness," we can add to our "Yes" a "but not necessarily." Nobody needs reminding that alcohol is more commonly categorized as a "depressant," or that only a select proportion of drinkers becomes more aggressive; and if by "private outlook" is meant "interiority of introspection," I suspect this mostly applies to a special tiny class of littérateur which does not drink to forget or to socialize.
Why the credit card should obsolesce "money" (as opposed to "paper cash") is a mystery to me, as is why Aristotelian Causality intensifies into Formal Cause in particular. How the car obsoletes the horse-and-buggy is apparent, but how "Crowd" obsoletes "the individual, private identity" is not. Specifically, though it may be true that one "loses oneself" while part of a crowd or mob, that crowds exist does not obsolesce private identity in anywhere close to the way that that cars exist obsolesces horses. And here obsolesce takes on two similar-but-orthogonal entendres, which is about as kosher as saying the written word and the telescope both "extend the eye" (117). Whether this is multimodal 4-D analysis or sloppy sense conflation I'll leave you to judge, but I at least felt like saying "That's a stretch" to many of the attributions made herein; anyone can take a concept, find the loosest interpretation still applicable as metaphor for another concept, and claim connection. So hermeneutics also intensifies into apophenia, you see.
A couple last notes. Firstly, the final sentence "Else we will have no more control of this technology and environment than we have of the wind and the tides" posits control as a sort of telos for the New Science and as a self-evident desideratum. Why should it be? I have my own answers, but a chance to compare and contrast would've been nice. Secondly, if we do decide to take his claim to place at face, McLuhan is still very, very obviously the third in a sequence of Bacon, Vico, McLuhan… Who is be the fourth grammarian? Whose tetrad shall complete the tetrad of tetrads?
April 16, 2025
He said most of what he had to say in extensions of man imho.
January 24, 2011
Currently stalled...lots of food for thought, but very inside baseball and academic in the first few chapters.
May 28, 2020
McLuhan is famous for his aphoristic style, but I think one problem of such fame/attributions of style are that they obscure that sometimes he doesn't do a great job of actually explaining what he means in a manner that is clear or understandable to readers. Laws of Media is a great example, where there are intensely lucid, quotable, interesting passages...and then parts where he lapses into so deep a conversation with almost literally ancient scholarship that the clarity of his argument and the connections with the clearer parts are simply obscured. The concept of the tetrad that he unpacks seems to be an intensely interesting and useful tool for examining the effects and consequence of media and metaphors, which connect very clearly and concretely with concerns of speech and communication as action, but beyond that I think this book is a tad too long and maybe even a lot too overworked.
August 9, 2022
Are McLuhan's laws truly immutable? Probably not. But there's so much to chew on here. For someone often charged with being overly metaphoric - firing off aphorisms left and right, pew pew - his thought is more unified than his critics believe. There's a real system sketched out here. Does it hold? Either way, it's criminally under read...
March 9, 2019
😠😠😠😠😠
Odio las ciencias sociales, a los estudiosos de estas materias a sus putos libros fumados e incomprensibles, mueranse todos, sufran en la lumbre de una hoguera.
¡Viva las matemáticas y las ciencias naturales!
Odio las ciencias sociales, a los estudiosos de estas materias a sus putos libros fumados e incomprensibles, mueranse todos, sufran en la lumbre de una hoguera.
¡Viva las matemáticas y las ciencias naturales!
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May 27, 2009interesting stuff....to say the least....
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews