Facebook as the new Global Village

Marshall Mcluhan’s The Global Village remarks on the Tetrad Structure of effects caused by any medium of communication, for example Facebook. [1] It represents four distinct effects answering the questions, what does the medium enhance, what does it make obsolete, what does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier, and what does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes? Facebook is one of the newest technologies that can be quantified using this model.

Facebook enhances the ability of people to be connected when they’re not together. It also enhances the ability to relive the past. In the film Jesse Eisenberg’s character of Mark Zuckerburg says “They can relive the party the next day on Facebook”.

It’s beginning to make physical interactions obsolete but not completely. It also obsolesces personal privacy, as anyone you are friends with can peek into your life and see what you’re up to.

Facebook retrieves people that we would have otherwise been completely disconnected from; people we would no longer see after high school now pop up occasionally on our Facebook. However this is not always a good thing, and why the site has a de-friend option.

When pushed to extremes the medium can become real life, when people become so consumed by it that they are interacting more on the internet than they are in the physical world. In the film Justin Timberlake’s character Sean Parker says “We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're going to live on the internet!” Facebook seems to be another step toward technologies digitizing life.

The two most astounding things about Facebook are the shear amount of time that people spend on it and the percentage of people that utilize it, especially in our culture. Facebook has integrated itself for an extended period of time in our society and may take the place of various mediums of communication.

[1] Mcluhan, Marshall, and Bruce Powers. The Global Village: The Transformations of World Life and Media in the 21st Century. Oxford University Press, 1989. 10. Print.