by Sabulei victor

Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian professor of Sociology came up with four laws of media and one of them being ‘obsolescence’. He prophesied that the developing technologies in media will push aside the old media forms in future.But to challenge his prophecy, the old forms of communication does not become obsolete but they have just been developed and expanded by technologies to serve the same purpose they used to serve in those old days.

The new media subsumes older forms of media. ‘What is pushed aside or obsolesced by the new ‘organ’. New technologies keep expanding the limited number of senses and motor skills. The content of the old technology becomes incorporated into the new, further reaching technology. Writing made speech “obsolete”, just as printing made writing “obsolete”. The old technology is not eliminated, but loses its initial reputation and effectiveness.

The new media has just developed and expanded the old media in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and improved quality and speed. For example, people in the past used to write a letter and send it to other people by a messenger, but the new media has just made it simple through the use of phones and computers to type a message and send it via networks to other people. The message can be send and received in just a few seconds compared to the past media that even took weeks to make a simple communication complete as it was also affected by many factors.