New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication
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Stitched Into the Matrix: A Review of A Glitch in the Matrix
No full textA Glitch in the Matrix
Directed by Rodney Ascher
Magnolia Pictures (2021)
 
Tetrads and Chiasmus: A Reclamation of the Tetrad Wheel
No full textThis paper re-introduces Paul Levinson’s 1978 work on the Laws of Media: Tetrad wheels. Tetrad wheels serve to extend McLuhan’s original tetrads by exploring the ways in which the figure/ground structures that McLuhan discusses ultimately move the tetrads from synchronic analysis to diachronic analysis and from a metaphor-structure of technology to a chiasmus-structure of technology. Tetrad wheels are built by extending McLuhan’s claim that the laws of media derive from two figure/ground dualisms. Instead of stopping here, tetrad wheels understand the laws of media to be comprised of a figure (enhancement), a pre-ground (obsolescence), a pre-figure (retrieval), and a post-ground (reversal). This structure derives from the observation that—temporally speaking—-retrieval and obsolescence deal with phenomena which necessarily preexist a particular technology, enhancement deals with a technology’s immediate and proximate effect, and reversal deals with an effect which must come after the introduction of a technology.This paper re-introduces Paul Levinson’s 1978 work on the Laws of Media: Tetrad wheels. Tetrad wheels serve to extend McLuhan’s original tetrads by exploring the ways in which the figure/ground structures that McLuhan discusses ultimately move the tetrads from synchronic analysis to diachronic analysis and from a metaphor-structure of technology to a chiasmus-structure of technology. Tetrad wheels are built by extending McLuhan’s claim that the laws of media derive from two figure/ground dualisms. Instead of stopping here, tetrad wheels understand the laws of media to be comprised of a figure (enhancement), a pre-ground (obsolescence), a pre-figure (retrieval), and a post-ground (reversal). This structure derives from the observation that—temporally speaking—-retrieval and obsolescence deal with phenomena which necessarily preexist a particular technology, enhancement deals with a technology’s immediate and proximate effect, and reversal deals with an effect which must come after the introduction of a technology
The Good, Bad and Ugly of Social Media: Should Social Media Apps Be Regulated?
No full textThe service and disservice of social media are described and the issue of whether or not they should be regulated are discussed
Marshall McLuhan’s General Theory of Media (GtoM), His Laws of Media; Comparing Three Kinds of Law
No full textWe suggest that despite McLuhan’s claim not to have a theory of communication that in fact the body of his work does indeed constitute a theory of media and their effects which I have called his General Theory of Media (GToM) that also includes his Laws of Media (LoM). Both McLuhan’s GToM and his LoM are described. A comparison is made of three notions of law: i. McLuhan’s notion of law as used in his Laws of Media; ii. the notions of the Law in the legal sense and iii. the notion of law as formulated in scientific laws. McLuhan’s understanding of media is used to analyze some of the negative effects of social media suggesting that laws need to be formulated to prevent the misuse of social media that are antithetical to democracy and the invasion of the privacy of the individual users of these apps. McLuhan’s Laws of Media are then used to provide insights into the nature of scientific laws, the Law in the legal sense and his own Laws of Media
An Introduction to Marshall Soules’ Two Contributions: “Play Attention” and “McLuhan and Carpenter: Tricksters at the Margins, A Postscript to Play Attention”
No full textAn Introduction to Marshall Soules’ Two Contribution
The Transition From The Electrical Age to the Digital Age
No full textThe Transition From The Electrical Age to the Digital Ag
Letter From Allen Allen, film-blogger, February 25th, 2025
No full textLetter From Allen Allen, film-blogger, February 25th, 202
Evoking McLuhan’s Juxtapositions in the Digital Age: Epistemology, Archaeology and the Mosaic
No full textIn this essay, the claim will be stressed that the connections between our own digital
age and early modern modes of thought – such as emblematics, curiosity chambers,
fragment aesthetics and the salon culture – bear resemblance to Marshall McLuhan’s
method of juxtaposing the age of television with Renaissance culture. By studying early
modern modes of thought, we can understand our own technological times better. But
also: By critically reflecting upon contemporary technological culture, we will gain new
insights into early modern and premodern aesthetics and rhetorics, and the
epistemological/ontological discourses embracing them
Scientificizing McLuhan: About the Predicates of Man-Machine Coupling and the Triplex Isomorphism Hypothesis
No full textIn Laws of Media, written with his son Eric, Marshall McLuhan has tried to assign scientific status to
his ideas about media and culture, presenting his now famous Tetrad model and offering several
examples of its application on media and other cultural phenomena. Like McLuhan, this article
adopts a perceptual bias characteristic of media ecology. An attempt is made build a bridge between
the media ecology approach of McLuhan and some of the critical research on consciousness and
the brain of the past few decades. An inquiry is made of the impact of media on the operations of the
brain and its neural connections.
Departing from several referential works from authors such as McLuhan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Humberto Maturana, Andy Clark, Evan Thompson and Alva Noe, we discuss the idea that media not
only engenders its specific perceptual bias, but also creates a kind of experience related to the
epistemic context from which it emerges. By following this path, it is possible to understand humanmachine
coupling – specifically within digital culture. Through an examination of the hypothesis of a
triplex isomorphism between <brain>, <apparatus> and <experience>, McLuhan’s approach to
understanding media begins to develop a hard-science validity