McLuhan on the Media Maelstorm

This is a clip from the 2002 documentary McLuhan's Wake - released by the National Film Board of Canada. The film is based upon the book Laws of Media, completed after McLuhan's death by his son Eric. In it McLuhan asks four fundamental questions regarding new media/technologies:

1. What does it enhance or intensify?
2. What does it render obsolete or replace?
3. What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?
4. What does it produce or become when pushed to an extreme?

Marshall McLuhan called these questions the tetrad, and said they could be used to help understand any human artifact, perhaps even natural systems. Say you have an ecological system and a new organism evolves. How do you assess the impact? McLuhans tetrad is a perfect template for that analysis in the same way you would assess a human artifact.

McLuhan also suggests every new medium a) extends a human property (the car extends the foot); b) obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or a form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports); c) retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier); d) flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis).

McLuhan argued that if we dont understand the effects of the human technology that we use, how can we understand their general implications?