Response to Hot and Cold Media

Feels a bit pointless to retread much of what has already been said in the class lecture, which is to say that Marshall McLuhan's viewpoints certainly show their age to that of a modern audience. Media which may have been "cold" at the time have warmed (as television has changed drastically since it's initial infancy at the time of McLuhan), but while I can drone about what McLuhan got wrong and that he's an old man yelling at a cloud in my twenty-first century mindset, I'd rather explore his idea of hot and cold media and how it plays into current forms of media.

Looking at the internet, we can look into various forums, social media networks, and so forth, and attempt to place those constructs into ideas of hot and cold media, but I personally believe the internet is a form of media that isn't so easily placed. Despite the passivity of Instagram, where you simply look at images in a way that can be argued hot, there is a process to make accounts, follow other accounts, and craft an algorithm before you can even think of that, possibly making it cooler in the process? Same goes for almost any mainstream social media, versus going to see a movie which requires little personal action. But then I guess some can argue that making an account and following accounts doesn't necessarily count when arguing on the hot or cold state of social media, which I suppose makes sense, as we don't consider the act of driving to the movie theater part of viewing a film. And again, the sensory quality of social media is normally at a higher quality, immersing oneself when viewing something on a platform.

As for forums, we could consider them colder in terms of the amount of participation required to involve oneself in a forum, read posts, and continue down certain threads, but I also feel this is highly dependent on the forum in question. After all, before gaining its hateful reputation, 4Chan was initially just a board to share images and videos, and there are similar forums that do the same without being flooded by general toxicity. I see that I am completely rambling now so to wrap this up I'd just like to conclude by saying the concept of hot and cold media is certainly interesting, if not being a little dated when originally applied, but I do find it interesting applying it to something like the vastness of the internet, where the lines between hot and cold blur noticeably.