There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information is provided. the ear is given a meager amount of information. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.
High definition means well-defined, sharp and detailed visually, such as a map. Low definition refers to indistinct images scanned by the eye, with which the viewer is left to fill in the blanks, such as a sketch
Radio hot
Tv cool
Speech cool
Film hot
Print hot
Photograph cool
Cartoon cool
Telephone cool
Internet?
Hot medium extends one sense in “high definition.” Cool is of low definition, and requires that the user has to fill in information in order to complete the working of the medium.
"whether the spoken word or the manucript or TV, leaves much more for the listener or user to do than a hot medium." Internet: A composite of several media (photographs, print, animated images, movies, sound, telephone conversations, posted notes...) and also in itself a new medium of over 100 million potential "publishers" and interactors, the Web itself seems much closer to MacLuhan's "cool."
The global village. Today's instant communications have all but erased time and space and rendered national boundaries meaningless
The notion of a global village, while appealing to Web surfers and CNN junkies, is a dangerous illusion--witness the ongoing debacle in Iraq, which has come to pass in part because U.S. leaders kidded themselves into believing that Iraqis were just like us and would embrace democracy as soon as Saddam Hussein was gone. The hot/cool dichotomy has limited usefulness as an analytical tool. Consider a kid doing his homework while simultaneously watching TV, playing his stereo, and IMing with his friends, who pauses to rip and burn a few tracks for later listening, E-mail a photo, and send a text message via cell phone. Which part of this multimedia environment is cool and which hot, which interactive and which not?
Still, McLuhan was right about one thing: the central place media would assume in our daily lives. Less a systematic thinker than a provocateur, he was among the first to raise the public's consciousness--another McLuhan-era term--about communications. No one doubts now that we live in a postindustrial age or that we traffic not so much in material goods as in information. It's a stretch to say that McLuhan predicted the contours of the modern world, but the extent to which it has evolved in directions he anticipated is remarkable. The global village, for example, may have been oversold, but a version thereof is definitely emerging:
In medium is the massage, the form of the book itself it the message, as much as the content—it is graphical, pictorial, moves from hot to cool, and relies as much on aphorism as it does on sustained argumentation.
The formal qualities of the tv or the web is what is what we receive, it forms the message. We receive the code, no message.
Aphorism--Short pithy statement of a general truth—
-the-implosion-of-meaning-in-the-media/
Baudrillard—also wrote Simulations one of the most cited books by graduate students in the last 20 years—also science fiction filmmakers—
Asserting that we are living in a mediated simulation of reality, as opposed to reality itself. A radical assertion yet one that is reliant upon classical distinctions between the original and the copy.
his belief that the world revealed by our senses is not the real world but only a poor copy of it, and that the real world can only be apprehended intellectually; the original is a conception not a perception.
The simulacra is thus a copy of a copy
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