As I mentioned previously, one of the central premises of The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture is that media are not value-neutral. Rather, they influence what and how we think about the message. This matter of shaping, however, isn't always apparent. McLuhan proposed four laws of media that describe the process by which media influence the way in which we give and receive messages. Shane summarizes these laws as follows:

• What does the medium extend?Media enhance some function of human existence. The telephone, for example, extends the voice by allowing us to communicate over great distances.
• What does the medium make obsolete?New media change the relationship between humans and previous media. At times, this means the previous media are eliminated; at others, their function changes. For example, email makes postal mail obsolete in that it changes the function of postal mail as a primary means of personal communication.
• What does the medium retrieve? There is a sense in which new media borrow from the past, retrieving a prior (sometimes ancient) media or experience. For example, radio retrieved oral storytelling.
• What does the medium reverse into? In Shane's words, "When pushed to the extreme, every medium will reverse into its oppposite intention." This is probably the most counterintuitive of the laws, but I think it makes sense if it's approached from the perspective of strengths which, when taken to extremes, can become weaknesses. For example, television extends the voice, but it reverses into a medium that silences by shutting down conversation and interaction.

It's helpful, I think, to look at this by example. Shane mentions the effect of the printing press on Christian thought (and culture in general) by applying the four laws to the printed book. I've added somewhat to his thoughts here:

• The printed book extends memory and intellectual reason. It extends the personal encounter of the individual and God.
• The printed book makes communal faith obsolete. It changes the role of the community from the place of encounter with God and memory of the Story to a dispenser of instruction.
• The printed book retrieves individual, personal knowledge of the scriptures. It retrieves the disciplines of study and the personal task of knowing and understanding the text.
• The printed book reverses into a lack of knowledge of the text. When the content is immediately available, there is less a need to know and remember the Story. The book, when taken to extremes, actually harms memory by making it unnecessary. It also harms synthetic, holistic thinking by reducing the ability to think in nonlinear, intuitive ways.

This framework is extraordinarily helpful in thinking through the question of how a given medium shapes our perspective. Next, I want to consider a tangent question that the book doesn't explicitly address: how much choice do we really have in the media that we employ?

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