McLuhans Four Laws of Media

His Laws are the four questions that must be asked to understand the effects that will inevitable result from a new medium.

The Four Laws and the cell phone:

1. What human trait or experience does the medium enhance?

-The cell phone help people communicate. You can have you cell phone practically anywhere and get in touch with practically everyone anywhere in the world.

2. What pre-existing technology, method, system, or medium does this medium obsolesce?

-Pre-existing media that was used before the cell phone was mail (letters), the home phone, and pagers. You don't see pagers anymore, and mail is really used for cards, packages, and bills, not so much communication.

3. What technology, method, system or medium that was previously obsolesced or abandoned does this medium retrieve?

- Cell phones bring back tighter family relationships. People over time lost family connections because it was hard to communicate with family members who lived far away. Cell phones brought family ties back together because even if someone is not home to use there house phone, most likely they have a cell phone near by.

4.When fully utilized or pushed to its extreme, what till the medium reverse into?

-The cell phone was made for communication. It made it easier to find people, and talk to people while doing other things. Things that came from the cell phone on a negative side were addiction, sexting, texting while driving, and cancer.

-People are addicted to there cell phones. They have a lot of features on them that people are attached to and don't know how to live a day with out them.

-Sexting is new in the cell phone world, but it is becoming nationally known! Children as young as 12 are sending "dirty" text messages to each other.

-Texting while driving is dangerous. You have to look down at your key pad to type, so how are you supposed to look at the road at the same time? Its causing many accidents.

-Cancer researchers have new studies coming out saying that having you phone next to your head is causing brain cancer.

Conclusion:

If some of the negatives were looked at before the cell phones were made, maybe they could of changed some features to prevent some of the negative things that are going wrong with cell phones today. As a designer I'm going to think about the negatives in my product so that I can prevent them as much as possible. It could be something small that just needs to be changed the tiniest bit, but can make a huge difference.