Is anybody interested in being a part of a Media Ecology panel for ECA? My paper is analyzing Facebook through Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrads. My colleague Beth Michalec will be addressing Facebook through the work of Walter Ong. If you have any ideas that might fit the panel, I would be happy to have you aboard. Thanks for your interest or any feedback.
Title of my paper:
“Facebooking in a Global Village: Analyzing Facebook through Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrads.”
Abstract:
This essay addresses the following question: what are the implications for understanding the social networking site Facebook through Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrads? According to McLuhan, the tetrad is a way of analyzing how a
particular medium or technology affects a society in a given historical moment. He places these effects in four categories: enhance, obsolesce, retrieve, and reverse. I argue that Facebook enhances news as features of interpersonal communication and mass communication by means of the printed word. Facebook reduces the importance of the spoken word. Facebook
retrieves the prominence of the printed word in an age of electronic and digital media. Lastly, Facebook reverses the computer screen into a cyber-wall tagged by electronic graffiti. Although Facebook is a social networking site in cyberspace, I suggest that it transforms the communicative practices of its users in the global village.
Brian Gilchrist
4092 RT 151
Clinton, PA 15026
724-622-5383
gilchristb@duq.edu
The Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies
Duquesne University
600 Forbes Ave.
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Pittsburgh, PA 15282
412-396-6464
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