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Generally speaking, a tetrad is any set of four things. In ''Laws of Media'' (1988) and ''The Global Village'' (1989),〔Full title: ''The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century''〕 published posthumously, Marshall McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology/medium (put another way: a means of explaining the social processes underlying the adoption of a technology/medium〔(), Meta-Four-Play: McLuhan's Tetrad and Lévi-Strauss's Canonical Formula Part 2〕) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium: #What does the medium enhance? #What does the medium make obsolete? #What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier? #What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes? The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats", or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.〔("Tetrad" in ''Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan'' ), a virtual museum exhibition at Library and Archives Canada〕 Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the center. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the ''Enhancement'' and ''Retrieval'' qualities of the medium, both ''Figure'' qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the ''Obsolescence'' and ''Reversal'' qualities, both ''Ground'' qualities.〔''Electric Language: Understanding the present'', p. 28.〕 * Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. ''For example, radio amplifies news and music via sound.'' * Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. ''Radio reduces the prominence of print and the visual.'' * Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. ''Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.'' * Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. ''Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.'' ==See also== *Hot and cool media *Time- and space-bias *Figure and ground (media) *Media ecology 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tetrad of media effects」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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