McLuhan and Facebook

McLuhan, If you haven't read his work, you should. Every day I find it more and more significant when it comes to understanding the world around me. Lately I've been thinking about how facebook, and the Internet in general has changed every ones relationships in a very profound and significant way. It is difficult to see these changes, and even more difficult to understand them in their entirety but thankfully Marshall has left us with some tools.
There is this one article in the New York Times that scratches the surface of this discussion, but leaves much to be desired. I will now link it with the most interesting sentence that i came across in the article. "And as we stretch the definition of a friend to encompass people we may never actually meet, will the strength of our real-world friendships grow diluted as we immerse ourselves in a lattice of hyperlinked “friends”?"

I should be doing school work, so I'm just going to spit this out in order to get it "out there".
One of the easiest things to get across when telling people about the work of McLuhan is his tetrad of media effects (Enhances, Reverses, Retrieves, Obsolesces). Essentially we can gain a greater understanding of the effects of a media if we analyze it by asking the following four questions, and because we are talking about facebook i will put the questions that way:

1. What does facebook amplify or intensify?
2. What does facebook drive out of prominence?
3. What does facebook recover that was previously lost?
4. What will facebook do when it is used too much, or pushed to an extreme?

Don't understand what the fuck I am talking about? Don't understand why facebook is a media? Thats ok stick with me, and it will become clear. Lets look at how radio effected society.

1. Radio amplifies music, the spoken word (radio soap operas, talk shows, etc...), news casts, and are available to a larger geographic audience.
2. Radio reduced the importance of print, newspapers, books, and other things we look at with out eyes. Who needs a book when you can listen to rock n roll on an old transistor radio?
3. Radio brought back the spoken word. In a time when books were all the rage. Everything was read in a book. Radio returned us to the age of the spoken word.
4. The popularity of radio gave birth to the return of the visual (now accompanied by audio) with the birth of tv.

Now that you understand what these 4 questions are about, ask yourself them? I will not answer them completly today, but will at a later date. Please comment. to get you started

What does facebook amplify? Clearly it allows us instant communication with almost everyone in the entire world, particularly someone we've met in some fashion. We rely less on face to face communication, the telephone, etc... It brings back people we haven't spoken to in years, etc....

anyhow, mull it over, im getting back to work.