Response to Media Hot and Cold by Marshall McLuhan- Belle Campbell

A cool
medium
l
ike
hieroglyphic
or
ideogramm
ic
written
characters
has
very
different
effects
from
the hot and explosive
med
ium
of
the
phonetic
alphabet.
A cool
medium
l
ike
hieroglyphic
or
ideogramm
ic
written
characters
has
very
different
effects
from
the hot and explosive
med
ium
of
the
phonetic
alphabet.
     I think the idea of "hot" and "cool" mediums offers a fun and new convention to subvert. The concept of a media's "temperature" as static is something I've seen toyed with a lot, and even more frequently now that we as a society are like obsessed with multimedia. Examples that immediately come to mind are automated phone conversations which turn something that is typically cool and high participation into something that requires significantly less participation on both sides. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have things like that Netflix movie every one needed to tweet about "Bandersnatch," which is a hot medium in that it was a movie, but also required high participation, as viewers choices supposedly impacted the way that the movie unfolded. 

     I'm also not sure I understand the insistence that a medium that is higher definition would lead to less input or interaction? I've alway understood it to be that the more information something contained, whether that be visual or aural or whatever, the more people would be able to interact with it, which is why people hyperfixate on things like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. 

    Near the end of the article I started to doubt if I understood any of it at all, and thought maybe the tone was meant to be more ironic than I had initially interpreted it? But also it could be that this man is dead serious and just racist. Like all the theories about "hot" countries and backwards countries and radio in Indonesia and TV in South Africa just went right over my little head. 

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