Response to Media Hot and Cold

One specific point in the beginning of the reading that I don’t know if I agree with is that the concept of cool and hot media can extend to things like paper or stone as a substrate to write on.  I would argue that any physical writing surface would be the same temperature, and that rather the difference would be in digital text, which has the capacity for change by the user either by direct editing or interaction with the interface it is being read on.  

Ultimately I find myself unable to trust the author as a source of information for the same reasons we discussed in class.  Some of the information on technology is dated, and the author is highly ethnocentric and racist.  As someone who also studies archaeology, I find myself simply fixating on the errors in his examples (ie. the Australian natives given steel axes, or the example in the film stating that the Greeks/Romans were the first society with a written language).  Not only is some of this information incorrect, McLuhan’s conclusions based off this information is racist, inaccurate, and ethnocentric, meaning that he is judging other groups of people by the standards and perspectives of his own culture with no respect or understanding for other people’s lifeways.