The Fifth Law of Media

What they discovered became known as the laws of media, articulated as four questions:
• What does it extend, enhance, accelerate, intensify or enable?
• When pushed beyond the limit of its potential, it will reverse what were its original characteristics; into what does it reverse?
• What does it displace or obsolesce, that is, render relatively without dominant power or influence?
• What does it retrieve from the past that had been formerly obsolesced? (McLuhan &
McLuhan, 1988, p. 98-99)

.. Three of the four laws – extension, reversal and obsolescence – are mentioned in
Understanding Media. (McLuhan, 1964)

.. It is surprising, but only until one realizes that McLuhan’s intent is to reveal hidden grounds. Just as the laws of media are structured to find what is hidden from amongst juxtaposed elements, Laws of Media, the book, might also be structured so that an astute

..The connection among the tetrad elements, forms of metaphor, and figure-ground permutations is McLuhan’s own retrieval of the Trivium – his personal intellectual foundation from his Ph.D. dissertation.

.. This realization allows us to posit the hidden ground of the tetrad as the fifth law of
media: What current medium does the new medium “put on” or satirize, thereby revealing
previously unperceived processes or ground effects?

 

reader would be able to find what is hidden from amongst its juxtaposed elements.