Media Ecology of Cable Television

In Laws of Media Marshall and Eric McLuhan propose a fourfold process of examination they call the tetrad, consisting of enhancements, obsolescences, retrievals, and reversals, which is applied here to cable television. Cable TV enhances the quality of the broadcast signal, obsolesces the physical antenna and ability (or need) to manipulate it for best reception, retrieves the penny press of the 19th century, and reverses into TiVo, ReplayTV, the World Wide Web, and eventually into the common carrier model of telephony. But the attendant social and cultural effects overshadow any effects deriving from content alone.