Marshal Mcluhan takes a look into the future...

I learned a lot of interesting things this week about a man that I knew nothing about.  Marshal McLuhan was very advanced for his time and even predicted what would happen with our Social Media today and how we would communicate with one another.  This relates a lot to different things that we have learned so far this year.  We are constantly talking about facebook and other Social Media sites that have changed our lives, but we never really break it down into figuring out how it actually changes our lives like the way McLuhan does with his tetrad theory.  With the tetrad theory we need to actually take a look into enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval and reversal that comes into play with our everyday social networking sites such as facebook or twitter.  What does it actually do for us?  What is it replacing?  All these questions are things we never really take a look at.  It's funny now after reading more into McLuhan's revolations that I realize how much of this I've already seen in the short time I've been alive.  I remember when we used to use ICQ and AOL instant messenger as forms of communications and now those are things of the past.  Kids now a days have probably never even heard of AOL let alone AOL instant messenger.  It's funny how right on que McLuhan was because the introduction of AOL instant messenger into my life took me from using my home phone (which is almost obselete) to communicate to instead coming home and immediately jumping on my computer to instant message my friends that I just left school with not even 30 minutes priar.  It's funny to me how I never took any notice to this cycle that McLuhan predicted long before the technology ever existed.  For me AOL replaced phone calls, then myspace replaced AOL, then facebook replaced myspace.  All of these have slowly replaced and altered the way we communicate to other people.  His theory easily applies to Social Media Marketing as well.  We used to rely on news papers for advertising and now they're becoming a thing of the past.  People read more online news papers then actually picking up a good old paper hot of the press and taking the time to read it.  It seems that pop ups or ads on websites are the new form of news paper advertising.  People don't sit around and take time to read the morning paper anymore, instead we get automatic updates to the email on or iphones or ipads, which someday not to far away will be replaced by something more advanced.  It seems to me like its a never ending cycle.

http://www.newinfluencer.com/mediapedia/marshall-mcluhan/

http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/prophecies/1968-the-future-of-the-future-is-the-present.php

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/innis-mcluhan/030003-2030-e.html