on idea Channel we talk about TV shows cultural practices web ephemera video games we try to take seriously but not too seriously parts of the cultural landscape many people wouldn't expect worthy of serious takes and we do that through the lens of theory critical theory media Theory whatever it is jeek does sometimes those theories are interesting or complicated enough to Warrant examination on their own so today and in future episodes like this one we're going to talk about and pick apart one theory in particular to see if or how much it helps us make sense of the world around us we're going to call these videos but wait what makes one medium different from another I mean there are obvious differences books are made of paper or they used to be films are made of Celluloid or they used to be but do those differences account for the full breadth of how we experience each differently probably not reading isn't the same as watching and watching isn't the same as listening but often even reading isn't the same as reading watching isn't the same as watching and so on one theory for describing the differences between media comes from famed media theorist public intellectual Canadian and haircut ha Marshall mcluen if you've only heard one thing about this guy it's probably his pronouncement that the medium is the message but mclan was a prolific writer lecturer and pontificator on all things media especially television and advertising he filled a role we don't really have today Rockstar media theorist sure I mean we do have public intellectuals but mostly they're associated with the hard Sciences you got your Neils your bills your Stevens but when it comes to people who talk about Media or culture today we don't really have anyone who rolls as deep as mcluen did mclan had a large and often captive audience to lay no shortage of theory on his work stretches into many corners of media culture and Technology studies and in one of those Corners sits his theory about hot and cold media in his hugely influential book understanding media mcluen provides a framework for thinking of different media like television print writing systems radio the phone films as either hot or cold he puts his distinction in deceptively clear terms terms a hot medium extends one single sense in high definition while a cool medium is quote low definition highdefinition hot media mclan says don't require as much audience participation while cool media require more participation oh and he also uses cold and cool interchangeably not cool Marshall or should I say not cold anyway example time radio is hot because it focuses singularly on the sense of hearing it communicates its intended message and entirely via sound and radio producers work very very hard to do that they develop mannered delivery techniques do careful editing and mixing and so on and so forth there's no room for participation between sender and receiver because radio is designed with a passive listener in mind it's dense with information making it high definition which may also make a bit more sense considering our main man Marshall was writing in the mid 20th century so anyways radio hot speech on the other hand is a cool medium because it requires tons of supporting information to get a message across human vocal cords can make all sorts of sounds fly me to the but not nearly as many as an amfm system and connected speaker it was good dishonest work up in New York and what sounds vocal cords can produce and mostly we're talking about speech now often require significant interpretation in mcan's words quote so little is given and so much has to be filled in by The Listener end quote when it comes to speech that interpretation between sender and receiver is an essential characteristic of cool media it's Artful symbolic and multistream photographs are hot because they are for the eye in the same way radio is for the ear cartoons are cool because they are low definition and require symbolic interpretation and therefore participation the telephone is also cool because in the 60s it was very low definition and more like speech then radio surprisingly for mcluen movies are hot and television is cool let's talk about that mcluen sees television as cool because it requires endless participation but not in the way that you probably think with the TV the viewer is the screen he writes mclan describes TV images as low definition literally lower quality than film images the TV image is visually low in data he writes and Compares it to ancient handwritten manuscripts we have to labor on the visual field to assemble its lowquality approximation into the image it hopes to become by comparison the film image is more like the printed word he says precise exacting and even quote scientific mclen says movies are hot because they're direct and intense audience participation is low because like radio the content is very well defined its quality is very high the audience needn't work too hard to perceive or understand the film image which remember is different from the story told by it mcluen sees movies as fidelitous and natural he talks of the sheer quantities of data contained in each film frame and how films can capture realities armed now with some background I'm going to leave it to you to figure out why mcluen would say that a lecture is hot but a seminar is cool why paper and the phonetic alphabet are hot but Stone t tablets hieroglyphics and idiographic writing systems are cool now though hot and cold involves a talk of work quality and participation there's no real value judgment here mclan tips his hand occasionally and suggests what media and characteristics he thinks are more fun but he's not hanging signs reading hot media rules and cool media drools really as the title of his book suggests he's providing a way to understand media as an extension of people in this case how stimulus relates to involvement hot media provides lots of stimulus requires little involvement cold media a little stimulus and requires lots of involvement or as mcluen put it in short the hot form excludes the cold one includes but wait hot and cold is nice and it does answer our question about the differences between media but there are a few holes in the hull of this theoretical boat one of the more common criticisms of mcan's Distinction is that hot V cold like all dichotomies is actually just false Ruth and eliu cats point out that mcluen often does talk of certain media being cooler or hotter than others which they say indicates a relational aspect to this idea hot versus cold isn't a rigid binary distinction in other words speech may be cool but it's arguably hotter than talking on the phone television is cool but by comparison I imagine mclan would see the internet as positively frigid another criticism is not just of hot and cold specifically but of mcluen generally it concerns concerns ironically his frequent conflation of medium and message or maybe more accurately form and content there's no necessary correlation between any one medium and the quality or definition of its content there's no guarantee that because a medium has supported or popularized particular practices it must or always will mcluen treats each Medium as a monolith stable consistent and recognizable by the features of its content this again might have to do with mcan's era in the 1960s radio televis and film were arguably much more monolithic the main counterargument that I'm interested in is one that has to do with mclin's ideas about participation cold media he says are more participatory than hot media which are dense precise and meaningful therefore requiring less work on the part of Their audience I would wager this distinction has nothing to do with the medium and everything to do with the Audience by which I mean there are no hot and cold media but hot and cold people the first thing to get out of the way is the idea that that basically all media are interactive artworks radio movies television podcasts interactive even if you're just sitting there taking them in you have an active role in their existence when reading you may picture a setting watching a movie you may consider the motivations of the characters or just the beauty of the shots reading comics you laugh listening to the radio you think I like this or too many ads all of these things are active and all of these things are participation to not participate in a piece of media you must not experience it the participation that mclan writes about has to do with the work audiences do in constituting some piece of media through their experience of it but to say that participation is determined limited or extended by the media itself seems really strange to me I think it's fair to say that a certain medium may stereotypically be considered lower definition but to assume radio movies or recorded music's higher quality production give them an authority or ity which lets audiences off the hook as far as taking an active role in assembling the final product I'm not so sure for me at least participation is different at different times inconsistent within a particular medium there are certain films which feel much lower definition than certain comic books and a fair difference I think in the stimulus SL involvement relationship of different novels even if it's always just text or even just text on paper this Rel reltionship is influenced by story sure but also greatly affected by the way creators take advantage of the capabilities and limitations of their medium and how I respond if for others that participation ends up being the same across a particular medium that has more to do with them than the medium itself I think we always bring ourselves our experiences and expectations to the media we interact with to determine participation by a medium or its quality is to ignore I think the state of the self the media ecosystem and the relationship between those two things media are not hot or cold but to put it in mcluen terms people hot up and cool down in response to the media they consume this is the usefulness of mclin's theory it frames the idea that our participation with media fluctuates maybe not between and because of the characteristics of each particular medium but it does so nonetheless radio may not be all hot all the time for all people and the internet may not be a frozen tundra for each and every person firing up Chrome or Internet Explorer let's be honest rather than comparing one medium monolith to another in some Grand totalizing fashion hot and cold gives us two things one some potential insight into how media was used and viewed in mid-century North America and two a way to theorize around our ever shifting States and responses to media and its content showing us that while it may not be cool maybe we are you're cool we going to be cool you're so cool what do y all think is Media hot or cold let us know in the comments and I will respond to some of them in next week's comment response video in this week's comment response video we talk about your thoughts regarding artificial intelligence and how it wrote an idea Channel script if you want to watch that one you can click here or find a link in the dly do in case you missed it I was on Mental Floss this last week talking about America's birthday we'll also put a link to that in the description if you want to watch it we have a Facebook an IRC and a subreddit links in the dodo and the Tweet of the week comes from ingred hankle who did a line by line interpretation of the AI generated video and it is very interesting having uh so she says that she's never watched an idea Channel episode doesn't really know uh what the show is about and so came at it from uh you know a completely uh like sort of I guess maybe neutral standpoint and the stuff that she gets out of the AI generated script is it's very it's very interesting if you read no other interpretation of AI generated gibberish this week make it this one [Music]