But Wait: Are You Hot, Or Is Your Media?

On Idea Channel, we talk about TV shows, cultural practices,

web ephemeral, video games.

We try to take seriously, but not too seriously

parts of the cultural landscape many people wouldn't

expect worthy of serious takes.

And we do that through the lens of theory-- critical theory,

media theory, whatever it is [INAUDIBLE] does.

Sometimes, those theories are interesting

or complicated enough to warrant examination on their own.

So today, and in future episodes like this one,

we're going to talk about and pick apart one

theory, in particular, to see if how much

it helps us make sense of the world around us.

We're going to call these videos "But Wait."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

What makes one medium different from another?

I mean, there are obvious differences.

Books are made of paper-- or they used to be.

Films are made of celluloid-- or they used to be.

But do those differences account for the full breadth of how

we experience each differently?

Probably not.

Reading isn't the same as watching.

And watching isn't the same as listening.

But often, even reading isn't the same as reading.

Watching isn't the same as watching, and so on.

One theory for describing the differences between media

comes from famed media theorist, public intellectual, Canadian,

and haircut haver, Marshall McLuhan.

If you've only heard one the thing about this guy,

it's probably his pronouncement that the medium is the message.

But McLuhan was a prolific writer, lecturer,

and pontificator on all things media, especially television

and advertising.

He filled the role we don't really have today-- rock star

media theorist.

Sure, I mean, we do have public intellectuals.

But mostly, they're associated with the hard sciences.

You got your Neils, your Bills, your Stevens.

But when it comes to people who talk about media or culture

today, we don't really have anyone who

rolls as deep as McLuhan did.

McLuhan had a large and often captive audience

to lay no shortage of theory on.

His work stretches into many corners of media, culture,

and technology studies.

And in one of those corners sits his theory

about hot and cold media.

In his hugely influential book, "Understanding Media," McLuhan

provides a framework for thinking

of different media-- like, television, print,

writing systems, radio, the phone, films--

as either hot or cold.

He puts his distinction in deceptively clear terms.

A hot medium extends one single sense in high definition,

while a cool medium is, quote, "low definition."

High definition, hot medium, McLuhan says,

don't require as much audience participation.

While cool media require more participation.

Oh, and he also uses cold and cool interchangeably.

Not cool, Marshall.

Or should I say, not cold.

Anyway, example time.

Radio is hot because it focuses singularly

on the sense of hearing.

It communicates its intended message entirely via a sound.

And radio producers work very, very hard to do that.

They develop manner to delivery techniques

to careful editing and mixing, and so on and so forth.

There's no room for participation between sender

and receiver because radio was designed

with a passive listener in mind.

It's dense with information, making it

high definition, which may also make a bit more sense

considering our main man Marshall was writing

in the mid-20th century.

So anyways, radio-- hot.

Speech, on the other hand, is a cool medium

because it requires tons of supporting information

to get a message across.

Human vocal cords can make all sorts of sounds.

[WHISTLING]

Fly me to the [INAUDIBLE].

But not nearly as many as an AM/FM system

and connected speaker.

It was good, dishonest work up in New York.

And what sounds vocal cords can produce--

and mostly we're talking about speech now--

often requires significant interpretation.

In McLuhan's words, quote, "so little is given

and so much has to be filled in by the listener," end

quote, when it comes to speech.

That interpretation between sender and receiver

is an essential characteristic of cool media.

It's artful, symbolic, and multi-streamed.

Photographs are hot because they are for the eye in the same way

radio is a that ear.

Cartoons are cool because they are low definition

and require symbolic interpretation and, therefore,

participation.

The telephone is also cool because in the '60s

it was very low definition and more like speech then radio.

Surprisingly, for McLuhan, movies are hot

and television is cool.

Let's talk about that.

McLuhan sees television as cool because it

requires endless participation, but not in the way

that you probably think.

With the TV, "the viewer is the screen," he writes.

McLuhan describes TV images as low definition.

Literally, lower quality than film images.

"The TV image is visually low in data,"

he writes, and compares it to ancient handwritten

manuscripts.

We have to labor on the visual field

to assemble its low quality approximation into the image

it hopes to become.

By comparison, the film image is more like the printed word,

he says.

Precise, exacting, and even, quote, "scientific."

McLuhan says movies are hot because they're

direct and intense.

Audience participation is low because, like radio,

the content is very well-defined.

Its quality is very high.

The audience needn't work too hard to perceive or understand

the film image, which, remember, is

different from the story told by it.

McLuhan sees movies as fidelitous and natural.

He talks of the sheer quantities of data

contained in each film frame, and how

films can capture realities.

Armed now with some background, I'm

going to leave it to you to figure out

why McLuhan would say that a lecture is hot

but a seminar is cool.

Why paper and the phonetic alphabet are hot,

but stone tablets, hieroglyphics,

and idiographic writing systems are cool.

Now though hot and cold involves talk of work, quality,

and participation, there's no real value judgment here.

McLuhan tips his hand occasionally

and suggests what media and characteristics he thinks

are more fun.

But he's not hanging signs reading, hot media rules

and cool media drools.

Really, as the title of his book suggests,

he's providing a way to understand media

as an extension of people.

In this case, how stimulus relates to involvement.

Hot media provides lots of stimulus,

requires little involvement.

Cold media-- a little stimulus and requires

lots of involvement.

Or, as McLuhan put it in short, the hot form excludes.

The cold one includes.

But wait, hot and cold is nice.

And it does answer our question about the differences

between media.

But there are a few holes in the hull of this theoretical boat.

One of the more common criticisms

of McLuhan's distinction is that hot v. cold,

like all dichotomies, is actually just false.

Ruth and Elihu Katz point out that McLuhan often

does talk of certain media being cooler or hotter than others,

which they say indicates a relational aspect to this idea.

Hot versus cold isn't a rigid binary distinction,

in other words.

Speech may be cool, but it's arguably hotter

than talking on the phone.

Television is cool.

But by comparison, I imagine McLuhan would see the internet

as positively frigid.

Another criticism is not just of hot and cold, specifically,

but McLuhan, generally.

It concerns, ironically, his frequent conflation

of medium and message.

Or maybe, more accurately, form and content.

There's no necessary correlation between any one medium

and the quality or definition of its content.

There's no guarantee that, because a medium has supported

or popularized particular practices,

it must or always will.

McLuhan treats each medium as a monolith-- stable, consistent,

and recognizable by the features of its content.

This again, might have to do with McLuhan's era.

In the 1960s, radio, television, and film

were, arguably, much more monolithic.

The main counterargument that I'm interested in

is one that has to do with McLuhan's ideas

about participation.

Cold media, he says, are more participatory than hot media,

which are dense, precise, and meaningful, therefore,

requiring less work on the part of their audience.

I would wager this distinction has

nothing to do with the medium and everything

to do with the audience, by which I

mean there are no hot and cold media, but hot and cold people.

The first thing to get out of the way

is the idea that basically all media are interactive.

Artworks, radio, movies, television,

podcasts-- interactive.

Even if you're just sitting there taking them in,

you have an active role in their existence.

When reading, you may picture a setting.

Watching a movie, you may consider

the motivations of the characters

or just the beauty of the shots.

Reading comics, you laugh.

Listening to the radio, you think,

I like this, or too many ads.

All of these things are active.

And all of these things are participation.

To not participate in a piece of media,

you must not experience it.

The participation that McLuhan writes about

has to do with the work audiences do

in constituting some piece of media

through their experience of it.

But to say that participation is determined, limited,

or extended by the media itself seems really strange to me.

I think it's fair to say that a certain media may

stereotypically be considered lower definition.

But to assume radio, movies, or recorded music's

higher-quality production, give them an authority or clarity,

which lets audiences off the hook as far

as taking an active role in assembling the final product.

I'm not so sure.

For me, at least, participation is different

at different times, inconsistent within a particular medium.

There are certain films which would

feel much lower definition then certain comic books.

And a fire difference, I think, in

the stimulus/involvement relationship

of different novels, even if it's always just text or even

just text on paper.

This relationship is influenced by story.

Sure, but also greatly affected by the way

creators take advantage of the capabilities

and limitations of their medium and how I respond.

If for others, that participation

ends up being the same across a particular medium, that

has more to do with them than the medium itself, I think.

We always bring ourselves, our experiences and expectations,

to the media we interact with.

To determine participation by a medium or its quality

is to ignore, I think, the state of the self, the media

ecosystem, and the relationship between those two things.

Media are not hot or cold, but to put it McLuhan's terms--

people hot up and cool down in response to the media

they consume.

This is the usefulness of McLuhan's theory.

It frames the idea that our participation with media

fluctuates.

Maybe not between and because of the characteristics

of each particular medium, but it does so nonetheless.

Radio may not be all hot all the time for all people.

And the internet may not be a frozen tundra

for each and every person firing up Chrome or Internet Explorer.

Let's be honest.

Rather than comparing one media monolith

to another in some grand, totalizing fashion,

hot and cold gives us two things.

One, some potential insight into how media was used and viewed

in mid-century North America.

And two, a way to theorize around our ever-shifting states

and responses to media and its content,

showing us that while it may not be cool, maybe we are.

You're cool.

We're gonna be cool.

You're so cool.

What do you all think?

Is media hot or cold?

let us know in the comments and I will respond to some of them

in next week's comment response video.

In this week's comment response video,

we talk about your thoughts regarding

artificial intelligence and how it wrote an Idea Channel

script.

If you want to watch that one, you

click here, or find a link in the doobly doo.

In case you missed it, I was on Mental Floss

this last week talking about America's Birthday.

We'll also put a link to that in the description,

if you want to watch it.

We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit links

in the doobly doo.

And the tweet of the week comes from Ingrid Henkel,

who did a line-by-line interpretation

of the AI-generated video.

And it is very interesting.

So she says that she's never watch an Idea Channel episode.

Doesn't really know what the show is about and so

came at it from a completely, like, sort of, I guess,

maybe neutral standpoint.

And the stuff that she gets out of the AI-generated script

is very interesting.

If you read to no other interpretation

of AI-generated gibberish this week, make it that's one.