This week we read Marshall McLuhan’s article discussing hot and cold media. I thought this was a very interesting article. I especially liked the first couple of pages. He described how media could be either hot or cold. Hot media has high definition, while cold media has low definition. I never really thought about what high or low definition means, but I think McLuhan did a good job of defining it. He said that in a hot media, less participation is required from the audience. Just the opposite is true of cold media. The telephone is a cold media, since we have to participate a great deal to get anything out of it. Radio, on the other hand is a hot medium. He also stated how a medium may be low definition if very little information is provided. Some of this seemed to contradict itself though. He stated how the written word was a hot medium when compared to hieroglyphics but cold when compared to speech.
Another part of this article that I found very interesting was when a hot technology succeeds a cool one. He gave the example of the missionaries who gave steel axes to Australian natives. The axes used to be scarce and worked as a masculine symbol. Now, both women and children had them and when men had to borrow them, their masculinity was hindered. This tore apart their society. Besides being a good story, I liked this part because we discussed it in my cultural anthropology class last year. We discussed how even the smallest, most insignificant-seeming addition to a culture can be detrimental to it.
As the article continued, I found myself becoming more and more lost. McLuhan seemed to go on endless rants about organic myth or retribalization. Some parts also seemed counterintuitive to me. He described how backwards and unindustrialized countries could better understand and confront electric technology. This seems like a backwards statement. I’d think the countries that developed these technologies would better understand them. Even with the bit of confusion at the end of the article, I found it to be very interesting. I thought the subject of hot versus cold media is a though provoking one, which could help us better understand our own culture and community.
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5 comments:
Great post. As I mentioned in class, I share some of your confusion, particularly when it comes to McLuhan's categories. That said, I think the categories (hot and cold) offer a great deal of insight, though, as you suggest, they're slippery and mutable at best. For me, it's the interactive, participatory part that's most helpful, something that can help us understand Web 2.0 stuff and even, perhaps, a (weird) text like Lexia to Perplexia.
hi. This is a great post. I would like to thank u. It is very useful for my studies.
I think that there is some confusion as to McLuhan's writing here. It is not a dichotomy of hot or cold categorization, it is a term that is used in relativistic terms rather than absolute.
Cheers.
Agree with the anon above. Different media aren't pigeon-holed. they can be cooled down and heated up withinh the parameters of their code. Less "civilised" societies are better adapted to electronic technology because of the decentralising nature of it. Thus, an auditory, rather than a print culture is much better assimilated to that decentralising heirarchy than a "western" society. The countries that developed them are, in fact, the least well-equipped to understand them. "We don't know who invented water, but we know it wasn't the fish". Nice post.
Some good McLuhan vids on youtube from Professoranton and egoistorms. Worth checking out.
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