The Resonating Interval:
Exploring the Process of the Tetrad
By Anthony Hempell
Tetrads: Present
Radio-Television (Broadcasting)

If you live in Western civilization, chances are a large portion of your cultural, social, and political information and ideas come from the broadcast media environment. The true achievement of broadcasting lies in the creation of the advertising industry, the engine behind mass consumer culture, cultural identity and marketing.

Table 9: Tetrad of "Radio-Television" (McLuhan & Powers, pp.175-6 )

(A) Enhancement
Improves (regional) simultaneous access to entire planet
Retrieves tribal ecological environments
(C) Retrieval
[tetrad diagram]
(D) Reversal
Reverses into global village theatre
Obsolesces wires, cables and physical bodies
(B) Obsolescence

Improves (regional) simultaneous access to entire planet--everybody: "On the air you're everywhere":
The Enhancement of Global Robotism: simultaneous experience of two environments at once. This is somewhat limited, as it ignores the relative lo-fi and restrictive aspects of broadcasting technology which restrict the experience of the broadcasted environment to a narrow funnel of the camera lens and microphone.
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Obsolesces wires, cables and physical bodies:
The beginnings of a truly global communications environment. Makes the jump from an instantaneous "wired" network (telegraph, telephone) to an instantaneous, ubiquitous media environment: "Around the world on short wave."
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Retrieves tribal ecological environments: echo, trauma, paranoia, and also brings back primacy of the spatial, musical, and acoustic:
The re-tribalization (and homogenization) of culture: discussing "Seinfeld" around the water cooler at work. The common media-told stories of modern culture: Sitcom plots, the news, Superbowl, the Challenger explosion.
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Reverses into global village theatre (Orson Welles' Invasion From Mars: no spectators, only actors):
Feedback loop: Media image as reality: Kennedy vs. Nixon; the Vietnam War vs. The Gulf War (CNN); "real-life" conflict, disaster and misery as entertainment: COPS, America's Most Wanted, Ricki Lake. Broadcasting is the spark that detonates the explosion of mass "consumer" culture.
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Introduction | The Global Village | Tetrad:Concept | Tetrads:Past | Tetrads:Future | Bibliography
copyright ©1996 by Anthony Hempell.