Cooltown

For this blog post, we had to read a chapter in Jeff Rice’s book, Writing About Cool. The chapter was on the web, and I found it very interesting. The chapter started by talking about Hewlet-Packard and their vision of the future. They foresee a place called cooltown, where every part of our lives interact with the web. Even our clothes have tiny computer in them so we can interact with the web constantly. Our cars tell us what’s wrong with them and when. While this may seem like a beautiful future, it also seemed scary to me. We talked in class how if all electricity were to suddenly go away today, we’d be crippled. This would be even truer in cooltown. We’ve come to depend on technology a great deal, and I think at times it starts to degrade our intelligence. One thing to prove this that really stood out in my mind was our dependence on cell phones. I can remember when I’d have to memorize all the phone numbers that I needed. Now, they’re all stored in my cell phone. I don’t think I know any number but my own cell phone and my home phone. This point stood out to me in the part of the chapter about HP. The same thing could happen with the cars that tell us what’s wrong with them. People will start not realizing if their cars aren’t running correctly, and if the car can’t tell them, they’re in trouble. It seems like our dependence on technology could eventually lead to our downfall.

The chapter also discussed hot and cool media from McLuhan’s book Understanding Media. I thought this chapter did almost a better job of describing this idea than McLuhan did. He talked about how hot media requires little participation, while cool media requires more participation. Movies and books are hot, since we just glance over them, while the telephone is a cool media, since we must talk into it. One thing that Rice clarified for me, which I didn’t understand from reading McLuhan, is how movies are hot, while cartoons are cool. Since cartoons are less real, we must put more effort into realizing what they represent and making them real in our minds. Whether a media is hot or cool, we must be careful not to let it control our lives. Even though it’s nice for us to have technology, after a certain point, technology may be having us.