The concept of hot and cold media encompasses the manner in which various media affect our brain and senses. It also deals with the fact that different media tend to invoke different levels and types of participation. The basic assumption lying behind this dichotomy draws upon the different amount of data each medium is capable of providing. Whereas a hot medium extends our senses with an abundance of detail, a cold one provides considerably lower amount of information. “A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in high definition. High definition is the state of being well filled with data” (Understanding...pg 22” ). Provided that one’s senses are being filled with a sufficient amount of data transmitted by a hot medium, one can hardly expect the recipient to strain himself to increase this amount. If one is given enough information, there is no need to add or complete anything on his/her own. The level of participation is rather low with hot media. McLuhan himself states that:
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. (“Understanding...” pg 36)
The way hot and cold media affect the level of our participation could be demonstrated on an example of a jigsaw puzzle. A completed puzzle is not a puzzle; it is a finished, enclosed picture and the only way we can interact with it is to perceive it passively. We do not participate in its completion, and it does not invite us to do so. The completed puzzle is a hot medium. An incomplete puzzle of a cold medium, on the other hand, provokes us, lures our senses into putting the missing pieces in the right place. It enables us to engage actively in the process of its completion, therefore is high in participation. Hot media are for example print, photograph and film – all these provide high definition data; cold media are e.g. speech, cartoon, telephone and TV. Cold media provide low definition data, thus leaving more to be filled in by the recipient.
...television and other electric media override time and distance instantaneously - making the world a 'global village'. The globe's citizens share a culture which has much in common with that of oral societies. The global village has swept aside the individualizing culture of print production. (Liukkonen)
The business of the writer
or the film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his own,
to another, the world created by typography and film. That is so obvious, and
happens so completely, that those undergoing the experience accept it subliminally
and without critical awareness.
(“Understanding” pg 285)
The comparison of the television picture to a mosaic is indeed rather vital for McLuhan’s interpretation of this medium.
Marshall McLuhan Full lecture: The medium is the message - 1977
Part II at 6:05
Asked about the idea of controlling Television:
The tendency of any media is to attract to itself types of contents consistent with its limits and so, in the long run as people gets the government they deserve and the media gets the contents it deserves and there has to have some kind of interplay of harmony between these things. I would point to the fact that TV is primarily with complex processes and the kind of contents that serves it are complicated processes. Radio is far a package medium far more concerned with the package and the message packed. It is a hot media whether TV is cool or hot involving characters is much less capable to cope with package and much more concerned with processes.
This sounds like the formula Joyce used turning his Ulysses into a "cold" media. The complicated processes here is what is inside the Ivory Tower and Bacon fought so eagerly for us to pay attention. And you felt all over you as a bang and the Ivory Tower exercises control about what is suitable or not when it comes to Joyce. And everything else... And we are loosing what McLuhan squarely has demystifyed and you are crying out to people to pay attention.
The reason why the awarded, highly praised and extremely well executed film Ulysses, by Joseph Strick had practically no impact and people didn't care to see is because the film turned Ulysses into a hot media, i..e., the package and the "apparent" message took over and the real message, that is the complex processes James Joyce analyses, simply disappeared. The portion of the Molly Bloom monologue of that picture that became famous, was not because of the monologue, but because it is loaded with erotic content of the image that can be seen even if you turn the sound off.
Most definitely McLuhan has a lot to say to literature, and Ulysses is perhaps its best example.
This project is sort of "cooling" Joyce down in a much more accessible approach than the standard practices by the ivory tower...as it was Joyce's intention...
A Practical Way to Understand it
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. 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
A cool medium like hieroglyphic or ideogrammic written characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet. The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography.
The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly
An example of the disruptive impact of a hot technology succeeding a cool one is given by Robert Theobald in The Rich and the Poor. When Australian natives were given steel axes by the missionaries, their culture, based on the stone axe, collapsed. The stone axe had not only been scarce but had always been a basic status symbol of male importance. The missionaries provided quantities of sharp steel axes and gave them to women and children. The men had even to borrow these from the women, causing a collapse of male dignity. A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind.
For myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think frag-mentarily and on single plane
Scholars today are acutely aware of a discrepancy between their ways of treating subjects and the subject itself.
This kind of plan seems to have inspired Frank Lloyd Wright in designing the Guggenheim Art Gallery on a spiral, concentric basis. It is a redundant form inevitable to the electric age, in which the concentric pattern is imposed by the instant quality, and overlay in depth, of electric speed. But the concentric with its endless intersection of planes is necessary for insight. In fact, it is the technique of insight, and as such is necessary for media study, since no medium has its i meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media.
In terms of the theme of media hot and cold, backward countries are cool, and we are hot. The "city slicker" is hot, and the rustic is cool.
Francis Bacon never tired of contrasting hot and cool prose. Writing in "methods" or complete packages, he contrasted with writing in aphorisms, or single observations such as "Revenge is a kind of wild justice." The passive consumer wants packages, but those, he suggested, who are concerned in pursuing knowledge and in seeking causes will resort to aphorisms, just because they are incomplete and require participation in depth
