McLuhan's tetrad, at first, was hard for me to grasp. I'm slowly gaining understanding and I can confidently say I have a basic grasp of what he is trying to say. He wants people to go beyond what there is that is plainly visible, and get the more subtle ques and responses of people.
When McLuhan's tetrad is applied to something like the internet, we can say that it
1. Enhances speed data can get to one end to the other. No longer are we putting mail in envelopes, and giving them to the pony express which takes many days to reach its destination.
2. We can say that the internet can reverse how thorough we are with data. It's so easily accessible that we aren't really analyzing as much as we would when all we had were books and not wikipedia.
3. With easily accessible data, people are becoming (more so than normal) obsessed with information, like in the renaissance era, people were innovative and inventive. We can say we have always always like that, but right now technology and the need for information is booming, just like in that era.
4. The biggest thing the internet has taken away are borders. No longer do we have to travel across the sea to see somebody that's in Europe, we can use Skype and we can see and hear the individual, at the same time, it's also making physical interaction obsolete. There is a certain vibe you can pick up on from a person when you are physically standing in front of them that you can't pick up from a video stream.
Many of my earlier points can be applied to social media marketing. We see adds on social media websites that are making sunday add flyers in the newspaper become irrelevant. We are seeing this marketing virtually everywhere. Social media marketing tactics are strategically targeting people on websites like facebook and twitter to buy their products, no boundaries and instant access. Another thing I've noticed with twitter, that is greatly applied to the tetrad, is how twitter reverses the need to convey your thoughts in more than 140 characters. You can (I believe) put as much text, or maybe it's a 1000 characters, on a Facebook post. I believe we are seeing (or saw) social media evolution when the hop from Facebook to Twitter happened. Now a new social media website just came out called Path, instead of text, it's just pictures. Those are just some of my thoughts on the subject, and I was probably thinking a little too much about it.
links I used
http://www.horton.ednet.ns.ca/staff/scottbennett/media/index.html
http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/course/fall96/tetrad.html
http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm
