Things come in fours: Comparing Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Canonical Formula

The figure-ground structure of a four part approach to analysing media, merging McLuhan’s Laws of the Media (1988) with the Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Canonical Formula, allows us to focus our enquiry on the ways a new technology transforms society rather than technology content alone. The hidden biases of a new technology can change our assumptions about what is valuable and what is not, what is true and what is false, and who are the winners and the losers in the new Media Ecology. Ultimately, as Lévi-Strauss suggested in his study of myths, we may be able to go beyond traditional media content analysis to understand how technological transformations operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.