Forum posting and irrational rage

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Forum posting and irrational rage

Lib and let die: Aug 26, 2004

OP there's actually some merit to the idea that the transmission method or medium of information is just as powerful, if not more powerful than, the message being transmitted via that medium. In the 1960's, Canadian Media Professor Marshall McLuhan proposed in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man that the media itself, not the content itself is more influential on a society than any message it carries. He would also classify mediums as "hot" or "cold" mediums, based on whether some receiver engagement was expected or not. Other forums will laud the Shannon-Weaver model as an unassailable bastion of media analysis, but McLuhan saw that model as being tied to a necessary notion of efficient causality that was largely undone when the definition of efficient causality it is based upon was revealed to have been due to an early print-era mistranslation of Aristotle's idea of efficient causality.

Rather than a causal model, McLuhan proposed a 'tetrad' shaped model, described on wikipedia as such:

quote:

In Laws of Media (1988), published posthumously by his son Eric, 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 (i.e., any medium) 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.

Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the centre. 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.

Using the example of radio:

Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. Radio amplifies news and music via sound.

Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance 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.

Given that there are so many formats to internet communication, we can't unfortunately apply the Tetrad to "The Internet", but rather it's more suited to avenues of communication within the internet.

What does vlogging enhance?
What does longform forums posting enhance?
What do tweets and twitter threads enhance?

What do they obsolete?
What do they retrieve? For forumsposting, we could certainly argue a sense of nostalgia in the world of 240 characters or less!
What are they when taken to the extreme? Well, the Media Analysis & Criticism Thread in that forum is probably a good example of a medium taken to an extreme.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2021 20:29

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Lib and let die: Aug 26, 2004

Smythe posted:

thank u

sorry I would go annoy the other forum with stuff like this but I'm thread banned from the thread for discussing it because I was mean to the OP lol

# ¿ Nov 30, 2021 20:44

Lib and let die: Aug 26, 2004

Smythe posted:

i liked the post

oh i was expecting a bunch more 'didn't reads' and stuff. you're a very hard read yourself, mr smythe. bit of a norm macdonald 'is he doing a bit or not? i just can't tell' kinda thing.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2021 21:22

Lib and let die: Aug 26, 2004

The Saucer Hovers posted:

the medium is the message hth

I wrote A Lot of Words about this idea after all the AOC Met Gala stuff, when she tweeted out this statement. It's buried in the succ thread somewhere and I may go back and refine it, but she didn't do the idea justice, and really sort of perverted McLuhan's theories to shield herself from criticism.

vyelkin posted:

This is an interesting way to look at it, and there's one particular place where I think it's worth probing the difference not just between "the internet" and other forms of media, but within internet communication types. In particular, comparing a forum like this one to "social media". Of course you can see an oldschool web 1.0 internet forum like this as a form of social media. It's a medium where we're social with each other. But it departs from "social media" as we think of it today (facebook, twitter, tiktok, instagram, etc.) in a few clear ways, not least of which is that there's no behind-the-scenes prioritization of anything other than maybe recency, i.e., the default view for a forum on SA is to see stickied threads first and then threads sorted by most recent post. A thread with a million replies will get shunted below a thread with one reply if that one reply was made more recently, there's no algorithm sorting which threads you see and saying "this one with a million replies is clearly driving more engagement with the site so I'll push it to the top", it's just sorting by last post.

This remains one of my favourite things about SA, it's set up for people to interact with each other and not for people to game an algorithm to get their things prioritized. There's no like or +/- post rating system other than rating threads which doesn't do anything unless you're a deeply strange person who reads the forum sorted by thread rating, and so there's nothing for the forum to prioritize except what the users themselves prioritize by posting a lot. There's a real contrast with the engagement-driven radicalization engine of something like facebook or twitter or youtube that recognizes what drives greater engagement regardless of its content and pushes it towards more people to make it more popular so that people will spend more time on the site.

Or, put another way, we radicalize ourselves here instead of letting a computer do it for us.

Yeah, this jives with a lot of what I've drawn from my readings on McLuhan and Postman's works, though I might argue that in certain cases there is some sort of internal, background mechanism to promote certain ideas - curators of a forum can use various distinction tools available to them to elevate some voices above other though it's considerable less obfuscated than "the algorithm" because you can generally point to one of a handful of potential suspects that elevate a voice because the ones with that power are straight up publicly listed at the top of that forum.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2021 21:55

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