Lib and let die posted:

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:

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.