The interview of McLuchan in Playboy Magazine is pretty interesting. During the interview of McLuhan with Playboy, McLuhan discussed about the definition of hot medium and cool medium, which catch my most interest.
He describe, hot medium is media that only need low in participation of the audience to understand the data, which also call high medium. In the other word, cool medium need a lot more participation of the audience, which also being call low medium. Human beings receive information with their five sensory, which are vision, hear, taste, smell, and touch.
Through IT, we mainly receive information from view and hear. He mentioned media that has high definition and complete information with out intense audience participation such as photo is high media for vision since there is no block for audience to fill in as everything of photo viewing is exactly showed as reality. In contrast, cool media to photo is cartoon. Cartoon shows in low definition, since cartoon is drew by rough outline and provide very little visual data and require the viewer to fill in the missing or unclear information by his/her imagination or logic. Example of hearing, high media of hearing would be radio because radio provides a lot of information that leaves little or nothing to be filled in by the audience, as clear as a prepared lecture. Telephone in comparing is the low media because as there is more then one party in to the speech, both demand and considerable would be filling in by the listener and the speech would become confusing.
Hot and cold medium theory can be explains by McLuhan’s light bulb methodology. Light bulb itself contain no content, the newspaper does; however, with out the presence of the light, the information would not able to be receive by the viewer. Light bulb in this cause is the media to help viewer receive the information from newspaper. The brightness of the light bulb can affect how clear the content being view by the viewer. Bright light bulb is hot media, and it refer to low media when the light bulb is dim.
2 comments:
Did you see my feeble attempts at defining various media as hot and cold in my first blog entry? (include link) I used McLuhan’s idea to figure out what new technologies were hot and cold; new technologies I mean by media that didn’t exist during McLuhan’s time.
These were a few of my ideas: computers are hot and cold because someone had to write the html (the program that makes the computer function), and though we used floppy discs or CDs that contained the program, we still have to rely on instructions (either printed or visual). The computer can instruct but also allow creativity. iPods are cold I think…maybe they’re both actually, because I noticed that McLuhan didn’t discuss the record player (his equilvalent to our iPod). Cellphones, like telephones, are cold but they are becoming increasingly hot because they can now provide information, such as weather and traffic.
What do you think?
I thought that his categorization was interesting and fitting for 1964 (when Understanding Media was published). It was also a good segway into The Medium is the Massage which I found more interesting.
One thing that I completely disagreed with was when he was talking about the light bulb concept and his idea that content has little effect on society. Maybe during the 60's it was more accurate but today there's no way that that theory can be true when you see teenagers on the news shooting at their classmates and teachers. Violent media content has to of played a part in those individual minds that think that it's ok to take another persons life because they are having a hard time fighting acne and jocks in the high school hallways
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