Mike you're the rockstar media theorist of today! This made me think about whether theatre is hot or cold, and how Brecht fits into that? Brechtian works alienate their audience so is that making them engage with it more, is that like forcing the audience to be as cool as possible? It also made me think about different approaches to acting: a Stanislavski focus, which is what gets taught at a lot of British drama schools, focuses more on the internal state of the actor and creating "true" reactions, same with Method acting; that'd be trying to make the actor hot I suppose, making their (re)acting as high definition as possible? Whereas a Meisner-based technique focuses more on the other actor you're playing across from and prompting them to engage, so that's like trying to make them cool down? I dunno, I'm just thinking aloud tbh
My biggest issue with this theory is that often it's precisely BECAUSE things are so packed with information that they require so much participation from the audience. That participation can be in the form of making effort in remembering plotlines, and feeling motivated to engage in discussions among fans.
To frame my suggestion, I will explain communication modes. There are three. - Simplex mode media allow information to flow in one direction only, from sender to receiver. They either do not allow information to flow in the other direction at all or require a drastic change in equipment to allow information to flow in the other direction or else information flowing in the other direction to use a different medium. Examples are TV, Radio, Movies, Novels, Newspapers, etc. - Half-Duplex media allow information to flow in both directions, but only one direction at a time. Examples are walkie-talkies or ham radio, telegraphy and letters by snail-mail. - Full-Duplex media allow information to flow in both directions at the same time. Examples are telephones and in-person conversations. (Communication over the Internet varies according to the app being used. Email is half-duplex, Skype is full-duplex, RUclips is a matter of opinion... you get the idea.) I'd like to suggest that McLuhen's "hot media" tend to be simplex mode media, while his "cold media" tend to be at least half-duplex. What do you think?
BUT WAIT! I love this! great idea for a series. It will be interesting to delve into the theories that help us critizise culture and media and relate our interests to an "intelectual approach".
This made me think of how much more nuanced media has become compared to the age McLuhan analyzed. To survive, radio shows must constantly interact with their listeners and encourage them to participate via phone conversations or attending live events. TV shows today can sometimes surpass movies in their quality and depth. If you haven't done so already, I would love to see a video about the impact of media on human behavior and thought -- this was a huge part of the journalism ethics class I took in college and there was a great deal of debate around how much media affects both society and the individual.
Something to consider is that McLuhan pointed out that the content of a medium is itself another medium. So if an action movie is more "hot" than a slow paced art house film, an action sequence is itself a medium, as is speech or whatever else. So the content of different mediums may be comparatively hot or cold but the content distracts most people from the effect of the medium itself.
You're killing it with the Austin shirt, Mike! Everyone comes to Austin, but they don't actually know how cold it really is. How cold Austin is compared to most cities lies within the whole Austin Experience. Although Austin is known for all its hot media, the music scene (ACL), the film scene (SXSW), the comedy scene (Moontower), those events take Austin as the medium to deliver the message to you. Getting around in the city is a lot of work, since there's a billion things to do in the city you have to immerse yourself to experience it all, and by the time you dive into the experience, it becomes addicting and makes yourself want to immerse yourself in it even further. I think this is the draw that Austin has to people, to make people work for the things they experience, but it has the award of experiencing what Austin has to offer far more satisfying. It helps bring people a very balanced feeling of hot and cold.
McLuhan would be happy with this video - all he wanted is to people to think about how the channel of communication (medium) impacts the message being communicated (impacts and selects). Here's a nice quote by McLuhan about advertisement and politics: “The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”
Absolutely 100% agree, to argue that the experience of media is limited by the format of the media as a known monolith is first to dismiss the experimental works that fall along the boarders (your interactive novels and your Homestucks) But moreso it's to dismiss the unique and tangential experiences the consumer brings to the act of consuming. For a normal eater a hot meal is just a 'hot' meal, but for a foodie or a food critic the same meal becomes a completely different and cool experience. I'm reminded of the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo; Murray Jay Siskind goes on a trip to see "the most photographed barn" where the context of the barn's treatment has become inseparable from what the actual thing and experiencing the actual thing is. But I definitely also think that McLuhan's theory then has something interesting to dive into on what leads or at least lends itself to enabling people's engagement with the message. What does the engagement do as far as it relates to the actual material of the media and people's consumption of that material?
With the introduction of the internet, hasn't all media become cold? TV and Movies are now produced on the same level (Game of Thrones is a good example). Sharing culture has promoted a massive influx of audience participation with social media an other forms of social consumption. The way we "watch" or "listen" to Radio, TV or etc... has changed dramatically. Audience participation even if it's at simple as reading reviews or learning about new media through RUclips would make this dichotomy fall flat.
Yes. He mentions the internet as "frigid," but I suppose that meant discussion on social media and memes. The ability to share links and review and stuff has caused an ice age in media.
Internet Social media commenting GoT or else doesn't necessarily transforms GoT status, I mean it may not count because the reward of social media is in itself (see Charlie Brooker's Twitter is a Video game Theory) and GoT is just a Topic, not the medium. Plus that would mean that Melisandre is Cool ;)
GoT is a topic, but it is a manifestation of a medium because it's a TV show. The point with Gary's comment though is to point out that basically all media these days almost requires social media and audience participation to survive. Shows that don't have large followings often get cancelled. Regardless of individual comments on Twitter, Facebook, etc. the important thing for shows like GoT is that people are talking about it, stay talking about it, and are invested in continuing to watch the show. If a ton of GoT fans were particularly angry about one episode and decided to mass cancel their HBO subscriptions, you'd be damned sure that there'd be some changes to the show. It's not likely to happen though because it's more enjoyed than it gets criticized, but that isn't true for other shows. A lot of things these days survive or get picked up again by another service after network cancellation purely because of the audience following and that's something really worth thinking about and is very different today. Plus, think about films like Deadpool. If films are a monumental hot media, Deadpool breaks all of that from it even existing. Nevermind that the narrative and jokes rely on audience knowledge, for the film to even exist was because of the audience demanding it and harassing Fox. It's an extreme example, but that basically sums up the state of how things are now because everything is influenced by the audience now.
I would normally agree but we are talking about an "experience" as a complete package. How an individual interacts with a medium and the amount of participation involved. Before that participation was almost completely surrounded by the concept of consumption. Watching Game of Thrones is no longer just about the consumption of that medium. The experience is tied to the social aspect of watching that medium and is encouraged to be audience involved. We live tweet our reactions and spend time interacting with others together collectively participating in the culture surrounding our favorite media. Radio shows no longer spend most of their time at the station anymore. The go on site and interact directly with consumers and involve them to generate entertainment. We have built over the last few decades a new idea around participation culture. We actively interact with the source of our mediums as they happen and that has now become part of the "expected" experience we get from media. You were never expected to write to an artist about why or what they did. Ask questions and get involved. But now... You can just tweet out and get involved in the whole aspect of one medias community. Which I would argue cools down any medium. Sure you can just as easily watch a movie by yourself and not participate but that's not entirely how our culture has evolved. It's not how we are expected to consume. We are expected to consume socially. (edit: I wrote this before reading Reika and they got my point expertly thanks)
I'm just pointing that, in my opinion, media cult (let's say Got) revolves less around the fiction of Starks and Lanisters and more around ourselves. We as society engage conversation to gain social "approval points": Likes, Favs, RT's, +1's... Not that we don't care about the fictional world presented, but we care more around ourselves. For me, HERE is the cold medium and works as a Videogame and the cultural media (say GoT) has become jusr the topic, the theme. You see even this thread has an achievement system (when next week in the comment response video ***** will pick the most interesting comments).
Great video, I think all I can add is that when we rewatch/reread a piece of media our prior knowledge allows us to engage less. You can pick up a previously read book, flip to a random page and know enough to understand and enjoy the book. The same works for supposedly cool TV shows and movies. Our prior knowledge allows up to hot up a previously cold media interaction.
So, I'm a Film Studies student at my university and me and my Film friends are always getting into arguments with Media Studies students because we have a very different perception of the passive/active reading of film and other mediums. Let me explain: for us, each spectator perceives and watches a DIFFERENT film. People like Barthes, Rodowick, Hamish Naficy and any number of other theorists help us to arrive at this conclusion. For me, this makes the most sense. It takes into account much more than simply the differences between medium, and instead considers the differences in content, context, mode of production, exhibition, individual feeling and so on and so forth. It has downsides, it refuses to let any film ever really be a form of mindless escapism. If we are all informing our viewing experience then suddenly we are, on a basic level, critically evaluating Goddard just as much as we are Keeping with the Kardashians. But where I, and my friends disagree with Media students is in their insistence that a medium or incident piece of content had a REPRODUCIBLE effect on the audience. That is to say, if I watch a film on Monday it's hot and coldness, it's effect, will be the same as if you watch it on Wednesday three weeks later. The truth is that so much changes in that time, that the two films whilst certainly have technical, core similarities are experientially entirely different. Even if we watched the same film at the same time the minutiae of the moments you blink, or reach down to get popcorn, or leave to go to the bathroom, or watch the film on your phone completely alter it's meaning, content, form and everything about it. For me, the problem with Hot/Cold theory is that it suggests a consistency which does not exist in film or any other medium. As Mike said participation changes everything, and what I would add is that it actually changes the medium and the content ITSELF. ZK
I think you get it right. I have seen several arguments about how to interpret Wes Anderson films. Most recently on +Nerdwriter1 where he discusses what he gets from the film and what it means to him. The problem is, I think, one you touched upon and he kind of mentions. He talks about how much a certain film means to a person is based on where they were in their life when the first saw it. Then he gets into his analysis. I think you get into it a bit deeper as I just rewatched "Fast Times" and it was not a good as when I first watched it 15-20 years ago. Where as other films do hold up over time, at least for me, like "The Princess Bride" or "Star Wars: Episode IV" where it still feels much the same when you watch it again years later.
I feel the need to bring up the fact that nowadays, all different sorts of media have fanbases -- groups of people made specifically for the members to interact with eachother as well as their chosen media. I always find that I have an innate desire to interact with things, even media that is non-interactive at its core (like music, for instance, by singing along to my favorite songs). Perhaps this is the reason why concerts exist, to transform a non-interactive medium into something that is completely interactive and that an entire fanbase can enjoy without limits or borders.
Furthermore, I think this same innate desire to interact with things applies to everyone to a certain extent. There's always this need for communication because that's a big part of who we are as a species. I like that you brought up how media can be viewed as an extension of oneself. A lot of people in this day and age view it the same way as well, myself included. I think this is a very important thing to realize, that media, interactive or not, helps us (in part, at least) to meet that ever-so-important need to communicate. We are a very social species after all, and doing so helps for the overall survival of the group.
I would go further and say that people like media because of the ways they can interact with it. My dad's friend was just talking about reading the paper and said he likes to think about what the writers have to say and pontificate on it out loud. After all, what is the point of media if not to communicate?
I think a big part about the description of hot and cold is how much a something( in this case media)gives or receives. Cold media makes people have to be more hot. They have to give more to the work, think more be more active while hot media is more giving and can make us feel more helped, we have to do less work to get the message of hot media, but this also means that the message can be less profound.
OMG, THIS IS MY MAJOR, ahahah. This explanation makes it clear that McLuhan was a technological determinist. The notion that the kind of media framed the course of action the audience would take fits with his views. I'm really excited for this series! I hope you talk about more people from the Toronto School. I for one would like to hear your insights on Harold Innis' models of Space Biased Media and Time Biased Media.
It seems that there are certain media and mediums that *require* intellectual interaction to be enjoyed and those that given interaction do not *reward* it with enjoyment and that thus select for an audience. Pop music (as it is stereo-typically understood) may be pretty intellectually numb (worthless to a cold audience) but quite entertaining (valuable to a hot audience). Some mediums seem to especially cater to one kind of audience or another (film especially seems to seek out hot audiences) but that doesn't necessarily mean they're locked into that audience (there are plenty of films that require and reward interaction). In this way I think the ideas of "hot" and "cold" better describe genres than mediums. I think Mcluhan lived in an era where genre and medium where intertwined, whereas today they are more fluid and dynamic. This is kind of off topic but I think this explains what a recent Vox video pointed out while discussing sequels and genres. They did a calculation of meta critic scores and found that Action Comedy and Horror movies across the board got poorer reviews from critics, yet made the most money and most frequently were renewed for squeals. This can be explained by the fact that these are usually "hot" genres (requiring little interaction, not rewarding interaction) while critics by their natural are a cold audience (interacting regardless). Really great movies (which satisfy both hot and cold audiences) are the ones which have a low interactive requirement for enjoyment yet still reward audience interaction. Really bad movies (which satisfy almost no one) place a high interactive requirement yet reward the audience very little for interaction. A lot of failed/misguided indie films fall into the later category, whereas everyone knows the ones that fall into the former.
I agree that the distinction of hot and cold doesn't hold anymore today for *media*. *Genre* might be a better fit, but there's so much variation _within_ even a given genre, that I'd suggest that we have to either add the qualifier "typically" or go down to the level of the *individual work*. There's for example plenty of science fiction novels, that require very little engagement to be enjoyed. But there are also plenty of others that require a lot of reader engagement - either on the level of form or ideas (or both).
Nice "Derek Bailey" LP you got on the wall there! I remember years ago going into a record store looking at this record and thinking "this seems interesting...". I bought the damn thing and fell in love with European Free improvisation.
So the whole "everything is interactive" is kinda bullshit. I'm a video game theorist so I've thought and read about this a lot. The first dooderino to defend this idea was Barthes and it was then defended and built upon by Michel Charles in ‘Rhetorique de la lecture‘. Their idea is that you bring your own personality and therefore you are not completely "passive" during what we would usually call "a passive experience". Demonstrating that, Barthes developed the idea of a text containing "saillances" (saillant points) that mean you will have a heightened reading experience while reading some passages because of who you are and what you lived (being distressed during a violent scene if you've been exposed to violence for instance). But that's really a low definition of what an action is… So if existing, thinking a little harder in an action, then everything is an action (and therefore the word is useless as a concept). No, some medias (like games in general) are inter---active because they act upon you much like a book or movie does, but YOU act upon them. Actively. Like an activity. Like you actually DO something. Otherwise everything is interactive and so the word is useless.
The word _is_ useless in the absolute because it's completely relative. No true passiveness exists, therefore everything can be construed to some extent as interactive, that's it.
A lecture is hot because you get all the information served. You only have to listen and be a passive receiver . A seminar is cold cause it requires, not only for you to listen, but to actively participate in the learning process. Paper is hot because, once you've changed its shape by either writing on it or folding it, you've changed its structure to be unable (or at least less able) to be reused and interacted with by other people. It is passive, and so is the phonetic alphabet. The phonems in a language are clearly defined, they are just passive, unchangeable means to deliver meaning. Stone tablets are cold because they require our work to make them, to shape them and to give them meaning, which is later interpreted by others. Hieroglyphs are cold because they need interpretation. They were used by the priesthoods and they are a medium to tell a story, to guide a soul trough the afterlife, to name a thing, to engrave these things into eternity. They are a language that needs to be deciphered actively. That's my opinion :)
Nice invocation of House of Leaves.. That novel was so cool I started writing my own responses to the various editors and wrote another chapter / prolouge in the actual book, wrapping up both my additional layer of narration and my experience of reading it simultaneously. Similarly I think I read Ringworld in the same time period and had nearly zero involvement.. It was a very hot experience. So no, the medium isn't the message, it's content, and more specifically the unique gestalt between the content and individual, not form that drives hotness/coolness.
I think that hot and cold as a relational binary is most useful describing individual works within the same medium. It's hard to argue that Ulysses takes no audience participation as the audience is entirely responsible for its interpretation, nothing is given to you. Therefore Ulysses is cooler than something less symbolic and more literal... like Harry Potter or something. So too is Transformers 3 hotter than Godard. No judgement upon quality, just different amounts of work on the side of the audience.
+Sporsumus Torsumus That really would make a good scale when it comes to media, if beside a movie score rating included also was the average 'hot-cold' number so you know if your mind is active enough to get through it. People speak how for some things they have to be in the right mood, and maybe this can adequately be described using the hot-cold scale. When someone might be feeling very used up they would participate in something hot, and when they have energy to spare they'd go with cold. It wouldn't apply to everything, but certainly there is a gold truth in this to still be defined. It's also interesting how this is a strange way of stereotyping certain mediums, that people assume it is all hot or cold when it can be greatly either way depending on the specific creation. Comic books and animated films used to be considered entirely 'simple' and 'kids stuff' but now are being more and more very capable of difficult concepts and a greater range than previously understood.
Actually, Harry Potter is really symbolic - I mean, the whole series is about death, grieving and accepting mortality. It also carries pretty heavy (and obvious) themes around racial purity and prejudice, and challenges the idea of people having a sealed fate which is coincidentally a really common theme in Greek mythology. I mean, I'm not trying to say it's more complicated than Ulysses or anything ridiculous, just that the whole series contains tonnes of symbolism. I think if anything, this shows that hot and cold is also related to the engagement of the individual - someone like me, a massive Harry Potter nerd, might engage with the series in a really cold way, whereas other people who aren't really so drawn into it will engage with it in a hot way. I think internet series like "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" are another great example of this - you get people who sit there rewatching and analysing the videos, and others who just think hey're funny/creepy and random.
I LOVE THIS SERIES. I love McLuhan. Even if you leave his ideas aside, his writing is so efficient. Reading him is... laborious in a fun way? (I thought from the title that this would be about the increasing conflation of person and 'the stuff the person likes,' especially in online dating. This was better ;) )
It all depends on the receiver. Based on how we interpret and act upon what we see or what we hear, the media/medium will either be hot or cold. To me, it's hot if you're interactive with it by getting your full attention and you're full on focused on it, but it's cold if it's something like music in the background or something that doesn't require your full attention and mental interactivity.
Since you(r graphics guy) brought up Infinite Jest, I read an interesting analysis that argued that the ubiquity of all those footnotes, and the necessity of reading them to fully understand not just context but the plot itself (though, in Infinite Jest plot and context quickly become somewhat indistinguishable) has the effect of forcing the reader to engage with the text not just mentally the way one would with any other highly complicated novel, but also physically by forcing the reader to constantly flip back and forth across almost a thousand pages every few minutes. This device essentially forces a level of active readership most other books find hard to match
I read his divide of form and content as rhetorical. There are times where i believed i was autistic because i paid excessive attention to words used rather than tonality. This is merely an error of employing hot listening to a cool communicator. By stating the medium is the message, an extreme idea, he helps me understand to put more faculties on intent and fewer on content.
there is a scene in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" where McLuhan make an appearance. While waiting in line for a movie, Woody pulls him into the scene from off screen (through the fourth wall).
It feels like there should be a playlist for this that includes earlier episodes that would have been in the "But Wait" series if it had existed when they were posted.
I agree with the point that hot and cold is more of a descriptive term for our own level of involvement with media, than with the media/medium itself. Two people may be reacting to the same text/work/song differently: the average person may put the radio on to have some noise in the background, while a musician may intently listen to and analyze the harmonies and production values within the same material. (yeah, I've been listening to Reasonably Sound) ... Noise music exists in an in-between realm for me--I can't just leave it on in the background because it's often too distracting or abrasive, yet I find it most affective when I am consciously trying to listen for patterns, shifts, anything that may fall back within a regular song structure, and am forced to give up trying to fit the song into my learned musical expectations. Noise, and drone or other experimental genres, appeal to me because they are most often (but not always) initially approached with more attention on the part of the listener, yet are most effective when they defy expectation to the degree that one becomes overwhelmed, or made passive, like after the brain stops looking for melody 6 minutes into a 23 minute atonal piece. Sometimes these pieces can reveal how active our participation with media is on a less conscious level. It could even be said that a lot of media is hot only because we know what to expect from it, and that production values are not always relevant.
what i hopped you talked about is the condition we are at the time we are watching or reading something, like if i come from work i will not be participating so much to the movie i am watching but if i watch it on a weekend, for example, i may even write a review about it
very nice, you should do McLuhan's Laws of Media next, as it brings in the evolutionary aspect of the media environment, especially after digital networked media, but McLuhan anticipated many of the general features, such as universal access to culture and i formation, inclusion of all previous media forms in the new electric (now digital) environment, etc. More than that, the LOM describe another aspect of how media interact with culture. Robert Logan has written on McLuhan as an evolutionary emergence theorist more recently in "McLuhan Misunderstood," which is very good.
When I watched this video i understood how important is speak english, because if you look for videos in spanish about Mcluhan, just find out poor information , but in English you've a lot of options. BUT WAIT!! Saludos !
Bravo! Idea Channel reached a new level of quality in this video. I especially appreciate bringing Marshall into the library, he is as important today as ever. Yes there is no rockstar in media like him...except maybe Lynch. The acting narration was also greater.
Sprinkle here, I know I definitely "Heat up" and "Cool down" from media to media, and even content to content. Some examples. I heat up to Metal Gear Solid because I can that game with total immersion, requiring almost no input from me. I can just veg out, sneak around, and slit some throats! I cool down when I play Dark Souls, because it requires A LOT of my attention, Neigh! DEMANDS My Attention! Some radio stations I can Heat up to with good music and thoughtful engagement, while other radio shows I Cool Down to analyze, pick apart, and scream at my stereo in Angerbation™ Some places on the internet I can Heat Up to are Imgur, RUclips, and TeamSpeak. Places I Cool Down are Wikipedia and Reddit. I, as a consumer of media, change my temp depending on my mood, and what I am consuming.
But neither hot nor cold is an inherently good thing. There's a philosophy in entertainment that the brightest lights cast the harshest shadows, and to see in the dark you need a flickering candle to guide the way; to explain non-metaphorically, a dark tone needs fun moments, and a light tone needs serious or downright scary moments, otherwise your media fails at its intended tone. I think the same works here - Dark Souls, an overtly cold game, needs the "hot" action to engage the player; same with Undertale, the cold intellectuality of its deep message and at times excessive commentary needs a hot "quirky dynamic" to engage the player. Yet, a hot media without cold intellectual diversity is this thing we call "shovelware" or "pointless cash grabs". Not to say I want a lukewarm game, or that I want a molten wasteland sitting inside a frozen tundra, just that a single temperature breeds a completely unliveable climate. In fact, I'd prefer to live in a place with a colder temperature, a tundra even (game wise, I'm a Floridian) and it's perfectly okay for others to love a quite tropical place to stay. Just remember... Tropical climates like Florida have a nice oceanic breeze which makes them liveable, otherwise they become deserts. Those who live in cold climates need fires and heat to survive a place where little life has adapted. You can't have it just one way.
I hated learning about McLuhan in university, because it seemed to me that even my professors had no idea how to define hot or cold media. For me I still struggle with what "participation" can mean; is it simply the energy we expel in interpretation? If so, doesn't every piece of media require interpretation by the viewer, no matter how simple? Does this only include our senses, or does it include our thoughts? If the latter, who stops thinking while they are consuming media all together?? Also, can participation only be the struggle to interpret, or can it also be a direct response to media? For instance, would a midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show be considered hot because it's film, or cool because of all the literal audience partici.......................pation?
I hate professors' interpretations of media. Academics is breeding a self-sustaining air of falsehood. Making stories isn't something you should be taught by philosophy or directors, but actual damn stories; basically, don't study Steven Spielberg or even anything the guy says, study his ET (the movie itself) instead. That's a concept largely lost to modern teachers, especially film and literature teachers, and if I told someone I decided to study things like Undertale and Cowboy Bebop to learn to make great media I'd probably be laughed out of the academic sphere (not that I have any incentive to take part in it anyway).
Well, I can see where Mcluhan was coming from. Even though we have a very active roll in our media consumption, you do not look at radio expecting to see or smell or taste or feel. You just listen. The same goes for all other types of media. You are expected to react in a specific way to a specific kind of media. The problem is that is work feels outdated. Media has evolved a lot in the last years and it became more and more consumer dedicated. It is no longer about providing a "service". It's about satisfying the users thirst. There are different expectations in what you are suposed to absorve and how you are suposed to interact with it. You no longer just listen to the radio. Thanks for the video :)
Fan theory is, I think, the best support for your argument against hot and cold media. It shows just how far people are willing to go to interact with media of any kind.
Please! More McLuhan! I've been absorbed by his material for years now and I'm just appalled how little he's talked about today. He is one of the rare thinkers that has forever changed the way I look and think about the world. I think we could use a McLuhan revival.
The main idea, as it seems to me, is that the hot/cold spectrum (and given one of the counterarguments, it might be best to consider the dichotomy as such), is mainly about how much influence the message, the difference being that this "influence" would be subconscious, and thus different from "interpretation". In this way, lectures and phonetic alphabets (with their precise meanings and relative lack of redundancies) would be classified as hot, while seminars and ideographic alphabets (with their redundant forms and more vague descriptions of a given reality) could be classified as cold. Another way of clarifying the distinction would be on the terms of how much work the audience has to do in order to obtain a meaningful message from what was said; a cold medium requiring more effort than a hot one. This does raise the point that two different messages in the same medium can be located in different places on the spectrum, that is: "Is a written scientific text hotter than a poem?". This question seemed to also emerge from the last part of the video, when it was pointed out that media aren't necessarily monolithic. These are just my thoughts, and if someone more knowledgeable than me on this topic pointed out the fatal flaws in my reasoning, go ahead. I'm sorry for any eventually shady sentence construction, I promise my writing is much hotter in my native language (wait, I now realize the flaw with this terminology).
The internet is not per definition very cold. In this model you can see it more as multimedia. You can use it to consume very difficult texts that you think about which are cold, or even converse with people in a very abstract way. Which is very cold, but binge watching short clips of little kitties gets into the very stimulating and hot territory.
OK, that was great and you guys do deserve the "postmodern hat award". Which should be in tints of "42 color'. Whatever that means in hexadecimal or something. That was just a great discussion on aesthetics.
also as an actual response to the video, I agree that media can't really be described as hot or cold anymore, especially with the use of the internet. The internet provides numerous ways for someone to continuously interact with any form of media however much they want. so while one person may be actively engaged with a tv show, watching it every day and talking online with others about it, another may just use that show as background noise. But then again I might only just be agreeing since I have a slight bias toward theories that present the audience as active decision makers and why my go to explanation for things is the "Uses and Gratification theory" lol
"Sure we have public intellectuals(...), but when it comes to people who talk about media or culture.. today we don't really have anyone who rolls as deep as Mcluhan did" We have you, Mike Rugnetta.
I have to wonder modern video games would have been understood by him, given that it's a single "media" that includes such radically diverse experiences as Dwarf Fortress, Skyrim, Undertale and Hatoful Boyfriend.
It's the same for movies, books, etc. One thing the philosophy ignores is that tropical climates have this nice oceanic breeze to keep them from becoming these things called deserts, and tundras need fire and heat for us humans to live in their unforgiving environments. I'd say hot and cold is such a shallow definition from such an intellectual man, it's crazy.
This hot/cold media thing has always been difficult for me to understand. Maybe finally I'm starting to understand it. I have the book: Understanding Media.
Well, I don't claim to be an expert on these things, but many people in these comments stated thusly - Movies, defined as overtly "hot" by your main man, can be both hot and cold. An action movie or horror movie is low-intellectual yet easy to digest. Critics hate them, they often have abismal meta critic scores even if highly popular, but audiences love them (see: The Avengers and Paranormal Activity). Most small time Indie movies fail because they ask the audience to think about them deeply, for little reward. Yet even movies literally titled "Sex in 3D" (Sex in 3d? Really?! What was Sundance thinking?!) will get amazing metacritic scores almost consistently. Thus, as defined by one commenter in particular, critics are cold by nature and general audiences are hot by nature. Taking this further, many people concluded audiences overtly prefer a hot medium, not a cold one (although many others I saw would easily disagree). After reading through many of the comments on this video, I now think too high a value is placed on intellectuality within media. Not that it doesn't matter at all, it's just defined as one single state of being when it's really more like fifty (I only define two here). People can be inspired to explore a concept by a depiction of something that sparks curiosity, or they can have a deep concept thrust in their face by a depiction of horror and violent persecution or even a direct attack on an ultimately harmless majority group; both are overtly cold media, and yet while the former is loved by a general audience the latter truly isn't even loved by critics. An intellectual media, as defined by the former, can be exponentially more popular than it would have been without the intellectual exploration, strong examples being One Punch Man and Undertale. These are both basically miniscule franchises made by some punk kid out of his basement, something that usually gets about a hundred to a thousand total sales and fans, yet the intellectual nature of both made them explode. And yet, there are millions of movies and games and books all made with the same mindset and the effect is simply absent. I think another dichotomous yet necessary way to classify media, with the intent of learning more about it, is how easy to mentally digest the media is. We already use "detestable media", and this applies to Undertale and OPM perfectly. The message is presented very well - it's easy to understand, bundled in a fun package with quirky characters, yet ultimately invites exploration and discussion. This is what the maker of, say, "Sex in 3D" lacks - interest, accessibility, I dare say care and love for the medium (but that's probably my own personal bias against Sundance speaking - I had the chance to talk with them once upon a time, several members at that, and I chose to discuss the potential of fantasy as allegory. I was deeply curious as to why there isn't much of any true fantasy or science fiction in their works, instead trending a bit toward dramas and expensive on-location shoots. The conversation devolved into "well, if you want to make the next Paranormal Activity, you can go straight to Hollywood because we don't take that crap here." That literally broke my heart, though I've since recovered I still hold a grudge against the artists who insulted all my interests in one sitting.) I'm all riled up now, goodbye concluding paragraph. Ah well, I'd rather not punch too deeply into this, I just wanted to give my two cents on why hot and cold fails as a classifying tool... you said it fails yourself, Mike, I really just had a different interpretation on the why and how I thought you'd like. I loved this episode, your show is great... keep up the good work, you're awesome! ^.*
Culture is a gumbo. You can pick the shrimp out of it, but it will still taste like the whole gumbo. You can serve it in a can or from a bag, fresh off the stove or frozen into cubes, but it's still a complex mix that will carry some hint of all the chef's preparation, the ingredients used, and your old childhood habit of putting ketchsup on everything. Basically, I'm not sure you can separate out "media" and "message" enough to conflate them without using both ideas in the first place. Like, using a piece of string to help you navigate a labyrinth made of string. It's an interesting exercise, to be sure, and probably well worth while... but I'm not sure it's understanding. Like, how would a totally alien species (who only uses sound for echo location and only experiences light in a general or ambient fashion) understand our media? Would it still be the message if it had to be massively transformed? Would a movie still be hot if it was dissected with the cool care of a xenoarchaeologist?
I wonder how Mcluhan would react to the integration of almost every form of media into social media. I remember an add camping, I think for Agents of Shield, where you take an image and played around with the filters on Instagram t fond a secret message.
Hey Mike, long time fan - first comment. Must... Banish... Shyness... So, I think it's important to put this hot/cold dichotomy in context of a shifting social environment. I'd make the argument that as personal media, like Netflix, has become more ubiquitous, the sheer "action" behind mediums like movies, creates user participation. Going to the movies used to be hot - a monolithic element - but now, I have to put away my bunny pajamas, dress up, drive over to the theater after checking showtimes, make a hole in my schedule and shell out $14 in obligatory snack fees. Movies now seem like an event - almost like a concert, and that brings an element of awe to the movie media that might not have been present until recently. In contrast, now I can also put on my said bunny pajamas and watch an episode of sponge bob while doing the dishes. This is not to say that television is cold. As personal media has increased, stories in the genre have become more complex.
To overwhelm the comment, it seems like personal media, like Nerflix, has turned movies into short stories and complex television shows (House of Cards) into novels. This is very different from the SpongeBob episode - when I binge watch something - that becomes an event requiring participation.
My immediate reaction is agreement with the people who are saying that the hot-cold dynamic is better for comparing works within a particular medium than it is at comparing media. What this is really comparing then, at least to me, is how much interpretive effort a given work requires for optimal enjoyment of it. Some works are very straightforward in what is going on in them, and require no interpretive effort, while others have a layers of symbolism built in as critical elements, and come across like a cacophony of random stimuli if one isn't either seeking or finding that symbolism. We could probably also categorize audiences in a similar way, analyzing them based on how much they are willing, are capable, or even unintentionally do interpret works presented to them. However, as it seems to me that the most useful insight we could gain from that is how much interpretation the audience typically likes to be required of them by media they consume, describing works by how much interpretation they invite or demand seems to be the most useful thing gained.
This is interesting! To me, the hot-cold scale most closely evokes how "background" any particular piece of media in my life is. For instance, if I'm listening to music on my morning commute, that's probably more on the hot end - I'm not paying close attention; I just want something vaguely entertaining in my ears as I do something boring. If I'm listening to a podcast, however, that's probably in the middle - lukewarm, if you will. I can still multitask while listening to a podcast, but it has to be something a little simpler since a podcast demands more of my attention and thought. And if I'm watching a movie or TV show, that's on the cold end of the scale, because I want to be completely involved in that world - I can't multitask during that, except for maybe eating a snack. But this is where it gets interesting, because I definitely think that one's upbringing affects how hot/cold you find different mediums. I grew up with very limited television access - when my parents let me have screen time, that time was devoted to watching the screen, and when it was over, the screen went off. There was never any TV in the background. Therefore, to this day I am amazed when people are capable of carrying on conversations, walking around, texting, etc. while watching movies. I worry that my friends are bored when this happens, but often they are enjoying whatever show I'm forcing them to watch - they just need to multitask. Anyway, that's a weird/cool thing I noticed recently.
So; you might say that in so far as TV is colder than film, that theatre is colder than TV? But what about when the narrative breaks into a soliloquy? It's still theatre but at that point it becomes more like radio, with a very carefully crafted script and painstakingly refined delivery etc. Perhaps a single piece, if it is of a medium which is extensive in time, can change 'temperature' back and forth as it progresses? What springs to mind is RUclips Poop. When there's a bit with sentence mixing that would be hotter, but when it goes into a bit of noise or rhythmic skipping it would suddenly cool down. Or perhaps this is just a feature of the fact that a lot of the things we call media are actually composites of multiple media; with YTP being made up of sentence mixing, skipping, pitch shift etc. Or perhaps it'd be more accurate to refer to these simply as 'techniques', which can also have heat or coolness.
The idea that the medium only determines the hot/cold reception is not in your words "not sure, but I think, it's demonstrably false, even in McLuhan's time. Any given work can include the audience's interaction to greater and lesser extents - and will depend on the particular person. Poetry for example could be "intertextual" (i.e. have references within it to other poems) which requires the audience to "do work" to extract both pleasure and meaning from the poem. This applies to any media work - novels, comics, radio pieces, films, tv shows. And whether the audience member "does the work" to extract the meaning and pleasure of the intertext is up to the person involved. Highly intertextual works can be enjoyed by someone regardless whether they "get" the intertextual references or not. And this is only one aspect of the issue! I also think about the way I "use" television. Especially now that "television" also includes the high-production-value serial works like The Wire, Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc, new "formats" like "reality tv", celebrity gossip shows, and the same old 1960s-values game shows, chat and variety shows, and sitcoms, etc. The high-production value shows exhibit the same high quality visual language as films with the long-form story telling arcs of traditional serial formats. But I use these "TV" shows differently. When I am tired and irritable after a hard day's work I find I don't want to watch such shows because I have to do more mental "work" to appreciate their high quality, whereas a half-hour of a suitably dumb low-bandwidth game show or sitcom allows me to veg out a little and relax. So that (for me at least) is exactly the _opposite_ to what McLuhan was saying! As well as showing the one "medium" (TV in this case) to actually have different form and not just content. It's the same with films (art films vs Hollywood blockbusters? Each has its charms, each needs different work from the audience) and books too, I think.
I think the essence still stands, although the range of media has expanded and there are far more blurred lines. RUclips, Podcasts, and social media don't fit as either hot or cold, but movies are even richer and more defined than ever, requiring far less active interpretation. Also... Radio has changed quite a bit. Other than talk radio, much of it is quite passive (hot).
I think it would be fair to say that there are some forms of media that are more likely to induce hotness or coldness in the audience. While a book or a film will often have people being active in their consumption, something like a video game requires you to be active.
Disclaimer: I am a professional McLuhan apologist. Two things. Thing the first: there is, buried in the footnotes of "Laws of Media," the understanding that media temperature is indeed a spectrum. A media is cooler or warmer depending on how much critical space the audience is given at the first moment of the experience of its meaning. Thing the second: McLuhan makes allowances for the evolving medium as early as "Understanding Media," predicting that television will get, in some ways, hotter as the quality of the image improves. But the serial/episodic form of television makes it cooler; it calls upon the audience to recall the previous episodes, and this is a kind of participation. Superhero franchises are cooling cinema.
![Yeat & Summrs - GO2WORK [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/NEFEwfPcXRA/mqdefault.jpg)
I would argue that Idea Channel serves the roles of a popular media analyst to some degree.
In a way, yes. :)
HAHA I HAVE DEFEATED YOU
Mike you're the rockstar media theorist of today!
This made me think about whether theatre is hot or cold, and how Brecht fits into that? Brechtian works alienate their audience so is that making them engage with it more, is that like forcing the audience to be as cool as possible? It also made me think about different approaches to acting: a Stanislavski focus, which is what gets taught at a lot of British drama schools, focuses more on the internal state of the actor and creating "true" reactions, same with Method acting; that'd be trying to make the actor hot I suppose, making their (re)acting as high definition as possible? Whereas a Meisner-based technique focuses more on the other actor you're playing across from and prompting them to engage, so that's like trying to make them cool down? I dunno, I'm just thinking aloud tbh
"Whatever it is Zizek does."
Damn Mike, shots fired! (eats popcorn while anticipating the oncoming flamewar)
what the hell is Zizek?
***** Political theorist. The guys over at Wisecrack love him.
Yeah, I think you maybe overestimate the strength of peoples' opinions about Zizek.
Elliott Collins Yeah, you may be right. I just thought it was unusual for Mike to righteously burn someone with no remorse.
I'm not sure it was meant as a burn. Mike may just be in awe of the subtlety of Zizek's program.
When I grow up I wanna be a "haircut-haver"
In the meantime, Mr. Østergård, you'll just have to settle for being a "last-name-haver".
Andreas Østergård, what is a haircut-haver?
I love this "but wait" concept, keep doing it!!!
***concurs***
Yes, please keep them coming. Excellent addition!
My biggest issue with this theory is that often it's precisely BECAUSE things are so packed with information that they require so much participation from the audience. That participation can be in the form of making effort in remembering plotlines, and feeling motivated to engage in discussions among fans.
To frame my suggestion, I will explain communication modes. There are three.
- Simplex mode media allow information to flow in one direction only, from sender to receiver. They either do not allow information to flow in the other direction at all or require a drastic change in equipment to allow information to flow in the other direction or else information flowing in the other direction to use a different medium. Examples are TV, Radio, Movies, Novels, Newspapers, etc.
- Half-Duplex media allow information to flow in both directions, but only one direction at a time. Examples are walkie-talkies or ham radio, telegraphy and letters by snail-mail.
- Full-Duplex media allow information to flow in both directions at the same time. Examples are telephones and in-person conversations.
(Communication over the Internet varies according to the app being used. Email is half-duplex, Skype is full-duplex, RUclips is a matter of opinion... you get the idea.)
I'd like to suggest that McLuhen's "hot media" tend to be simplex mode media, while his "cold media" tend to be at least half-duplex. What do you think?
BUT WAIT! I love this! great idea for a series. It will be interesting to delve into the theories that help us critizise culture and media and relate our interests to an "intelectual approach".
Great idea for a series by the way; please stick with these!
God I'm so happy I let you and Dan Olson talk me into reading Understanding Media years ago. McLuhan is so fascinating.
This made me think of how much more nuanced media has become compared to the age McLuhan analyzed. To survive, radio shows must constantly interact with their listeners and encourage them to participate via phone conversations or attending live events. TV shows today can sometimes surpass movies in their quality and depth.
If you haven't done so already, I would love to see a video about the impact of media on human behavior and thought -- this was a huge part of the journalism ethics class I took in college and there was a great deal of debate around how much media affects both society and the individual.
Something to consider is that McLuhan pointed out that the content of a medium is itself another medium. So if an action movie is more "hot" than a slow paced art house film, an action sequence is itself a medium, as is speech or whatever else. So the content of different mediums may be comparatively hot or cold but the content distracts most people from the effect of the medium itself.
You're killing it with the Austin shirt, Mike! Everyone comes to Austin, but they don't actually know how cold it really is. How cold Austin is compared to most cities lies within the whole Austin Experience. Although Austin is known for all its hot media, the music scene (ACL), the film scene (SXSW), the comedy scene (Moontower), those events take Austin as the medium to deliver the message to you. Getting around in the city is a lot of work, since there's a billion things to do in the city you have to immerse yourself to experience it all, and by the time you dive into the experience, it becomes addicting and makes yourself want to immerse yourself in it even further. I think this is the draw that Austin has to people, to make people work for the things they experience, but it has the award of experiencing what Austin has to offer far more satisfying. It helps bring people a very balanced feeling of hot and cold.
This series is absolutely wonderful, as a film student this is everything i ever wanted. Thank you Mike
When you pointed out that a speaker unexpectedly interchanging the words "cool" and "cold" was "Not cool!", I thought that was a beautiful pun.
McLuhan would be happy with this video - all he wanted is to people to think about how the channel of communication (medium) impacts the message being communicated (impacts and selects). Here's a nice quote by McLuhan about advertisement and politics:
“The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”
Absolutely 100% agree, to argue that the experience of media is limited by the format of the media as a known monolith is first to dismiss the experimental works that fall along the boarders (your interactive novels and your Homestucks) But moreso it's to dismiss the unique and tangential experiences the consumer brings to the act of consuming. For a normal eater a hot meal is just a 'hot' meal, but for a foodie or a food critic the same meal becomes a completely different and cool experience. I'm reminded of the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo; Murray Jay Siskind goes on a trip to see "the most photographed barn" where the context of the barn's treatment has become inseparable from what the actual thing and experiencing the actual thing is. But I definitely also think that McLuhan's theory then has something interesting to dive into on what leads or at least lends itself to enabling people's engagement with the message. What does the engagement do as far as it relates to the actual material of the media and people's consumption of that material?
With the introduction of the internet, hasn't all media become cold? TV and Movies are now produced on the same level (Game of Thrones is a good example). Sharing culture has promoted a massive influx of audience participation with social media an other forms of social consumption. The way we "watch" or "listen" to Radio, TV or etc... has changed dramatically. Audience participation even if it's at simple as reading reviews or learning about new media through RUclips would make this dichotomy fall flat.
Yes. He mentions the internet as "frigid," but I suppose that meant discussion on social media and memes. The ability to share links and review and stuff has caused an ice age in media.
Internet Social media commenting GoT or else doesn't necessarily transforms GoT status, I mean it may not count because the reward of social media is in itself (see Charlie Brooker's Twitter is a Video game Theory) and GoT is just a Topic, not the medium.
Plus that would mean that Melisandre is Cool ;)
GoT is a topic, but it is a manifestation of a medium because it's a TV show. The point with Gary's comment though is to point out that basically all media these days almost requires social media and audience participation to survive. Shows that don't have large followings often get cancelled. Regardless of individual comments on Twitter, Facebook, etc. the important thing for shows like GoT is that people are talking about it, stay talking about it, and are invested in continuing to watch the show. If a ton of GoT fans were particularly angry about one episode and decided to mass cancel their HBO subscriptions, you'd be damned sure that there'd be some changes to the show. It's not likely to happen though because it's more enjoyed than it gets criticized, but that isn't true for other shows. A lot of things these days survive or get picked up again by another service after network cancellation purely because of the audience following and that's something really worth thinking about and is very different today.
Plus, think about films like Deadpool. If films are a monumental hot media, Deadpool breaks all of that from it even existing. Nevermind that the narrative and jokes rely on audience knowledge, for the film to even exist was because of the audience demanding it and harassing Fox. It's an extreme example, but that basically sums up the state of how things are now because everything is influenced by the audience now.
I would normally agree but we are talking about an "experience" as a complete package. How an individual interacts with a medium and the amount of participation involved.
Before that participation was almost completely surrounded by the concept of consumption. Watching Game of Thrones is no longer just about the consumption of that medium. The experience is tied to the social aspect of watching that medium and is encouraged to be audience involved. We live tweet our reactions and spend time interacting with others together collectively participating in the culture surrounding our favorite media.
Radio shows no longer spend most of their time at the station anymore. The go on site and interact directly with consumers and involve them to generate entertainment.
We have built over the last few decades a new idea around participation culture. We actively interact with the source of our mediums as they happen and that has now become part of the "expected" experience we get from media.
You were never expected to write to an artist about why or what they did. Ask questions and get involved. But now... You can just tweet out and get involved in the whole aspect of one medias community. Which I would argue cools down any medium. Sure you can just as easily watch a movie by yourself and not participate but that's not entirely how our culture has evolved. It's not how we are expected to consume. We are expected to consume socially.
(edit: I wrote this before reading Reika and they got my point expertly thanks)
I'm just pointing that, in my opinion, media cult (let's say Got) revolves less around the fiction of Starks and Lanisters and more around ourselves. We as society engage conversation to gain social "approval points": Likes, Favs, RT's, +1's...
Not that we don't care about the fictional world presented, but we care more around ourselves.
For me, HERE is the cold medium and works as a Videogame and the cultural media (say GoT) has become jusr the topic, the theme.
You see even this thread has an achievement system (when next week in the comment response video ***** will pick the most interesting comments).
Great video, I think all I can add is that when we rewatch/reread a piece of media our prior knowledge allows us to engage less. You can pick up a previously read book, flip to a random page and know enough to understand and enjoy the book. The same works for supposedly cool TV shows and movies. Our prior knowledge allows up to hot up a previously cold media interaction.
Mike you are the modern day Mclurhan, he questioned the media of his day and you and the idea channel do the same.
thanks for all the vids.
So, I'm a Film Studies student at my university and me and my Film friends are always getting into arguments with Media Studies students because we have a very different perception of the passive/active reading of film and other mediums. Let me explain: for us, each spectator perceives and watches a DIFFERENT film. People like Barthes, Rodowick, Hamish Naficy and any number of other theorists help us to arrive at this conclusion. For me, this makes the most sense. It takes into account much more than simply the differences between medium, and instead considers the differences in content, context, mode of production, exhibition, individual feeling and so on and so forth. It has downsides, it refuses to let any film ever really be a form of mindless escapism. If we are all informing our viewing experience then suddenly we are, on a basic level, critically evaluating Goddard just as much as we are Keeping with the Kardashians. But where I, and my friends disagree with Media students is in their insistence that a medium or incident piece of content had a REPRODUCIBLE effect on the audience. That is to say, if I watch a film on Monday it's hot and coldness, it's effect, will be the same as if you watch it on Wednesday three weeks later. The truth is that so much changes in that time, that the two films whilst certainly have technical, core similarities are experientially entirely different. Even if we watched the same film at the same time the minutiae of the moments you blink, or reach down to get popcorn, or leave to go to the bathroom, or watch the film on your phone completely alter it's meaning, content, form and everything about it. For me, the problem with Hot/Cold theory is that it suggests a consistency which does not exist in film or any other medium. As Mike said participation changes everything, and what I would add is that it actually changes the medium and the content ITSELF.
ZK
*Hamid
*individual (not incident)
I think you get it right. I have seen several arguments about how to interpret Wes Anderson films. Most recently on +Nerdwriter1 where he discusses what he gets from the film and what it means to him. The problem is, I think, one you touched upon and he kind of mentions. He talks about how much a certain film means to a person is based on where they were in their life when the first saw it. Then he gets into his analysis. I think you get into it a bit deeper as I just rewatched "Fast Times" and it was not a good as when I first watched it 15-20 years ago. Where as other films do hold up over time, at least for me, like "The Princess Bride" or "Star Wars: Episode IV" where it still feels much the same when you watch it again years later.
I feel the need to bring up the fact that nowadays, all different sorts of media have fanbases -- groups of people made specifically for the members to interact with eachother as well as their chosen media. I always find that I have an innate desire to interact with things, even media that is non-interactive at its core (like music, for instance, by singing along to my favorite songs). Perhaps this is the reason why concerts exist, to transform a non-interactive medium into something that is completely interactive and that an entire fanbase can enjoy without limits or borders.
Furthermore, I think this same innate desire to interact with things applies to everyone to a certain extent. There's always this need for communication because that's a big part of who we are as a species. I like that you brought up how media can be viewed as an extension of oneself. A lot of people in this day and age view it the same way as well, myself included. I think this is a very important thing to realize, that media, interactive or not, helps us (in part, at least) to meet that ever-so-important need to communicate. We are a very social species after all, and doing so helps for the overall survival of the group.
I would go further and say that people like media because of the ways they can interact with it. My dad's friend was just talking about reading the paper and said he likes to think about what the writers have to say and pontificate on it out loud. After all, what is the point of media if not to communicate?
That reminds me:
Fan theories=liquid nitrogen.
Well sure, we all respond differently to different media,
I really agree with the point, "we bring our experience to the media"
I really like this "but wait" format. The comment responses could be "but wait with the 'but wait'!"
3:37 Quick! Someone make an YTP of this!
Where's Da-Things when we need him......
I think a big part about the description of hot and cold is how much a something( in this case media)gives or receives. Cold media makes people have to be more hot. They have to give more to the work, think more be more active while hot media is more giving and can make us feel more helped, we have to do less work to get the message of hot media, but this also means that the message can be less profound.
My SSD gets pretty hot when it's caching you, Mike.
OMG, THIS IS MY MAJOR, ahahah.
This explanation makes it clear that McLuhan was a technological determinist. The notion that the kind of media framed the course of action the audience would take fits with his views. I'm really excited for this series! I hope you talk about more people from the Toronto School. I for one would like to hear your insights on Harold Innis' models of Space Biased Media and Time Biased Media.
It seems that there are certain media and mediums that *require* intellectual interaction to be enjoyed and those that given interaction do not *reward* it with enjoyment and that thus select for an audience. Pop music (as it is stereo-typically understood) may be pretty intellectually numb (worthless to a cold audience) but quite entertaining (valuable to a hot audience). Some mediums seem to especially cater to one kind of audience or another (film especially seems to seek out hot audiences) but that doesn't necessarily mean they're locked into that audience (there are plenty of films that require and reward interaction). In this way I think the ideas of "hot" and "cold" better describe genres than mediums. I think Mcluhan lived in an era where genre and medium where intertwined, whereas today they are more fluid and dynamic.
This is kind of off topic but I think this explains what a recent Vox video pointed out while discussing sequels and genres. They did a calculation of meta critic scores and found that Action Comedy and Horror movies across the board got poorer reviews from critics, yet made the most money and most frequently were renewed for squeals. This can be explained by the fact that these are usually "hot" genres (requiring little interaction, not rewarding interaction) while critics by their natural are a cold audience (interacting regardless). Really great movies (which satisfy both hot and cold audiences) are the ones which have a low interactive requirement for enjoyment yet still reward audience interaction. Really bad movies (which satisfy almost no one) place a high interactive requirement yet reward the audience very little for interaction. A lot of failed/misguided indie films fall into the later category, whereas everyone knows the ones that fall into the former.
I 100% agree
I agree that the distinction of hot and cold doesn't hold anymore today for *media*. *Genre* might be a better fit, but there's so much variation _within_ even a given genre, that I'd suggest that we have to either add the qualifier "typically" or go down to the level of the *individual work*. There's for example plenty of science fiction novels, that require very little engagement to be enjoyed. But there are also plenty of others that require a lot of reader engagement - either on the level of form or ideas (or both).
I feel like this would be a good segue into Roland Barthes's 'death of the author, birth of the reader' idea, and how anything can be a 'text'.
this is so well done and entertaining that i didnt even realise it was done 6 years ago. great job! still very helpful today :)
rock star media theorist = MIKE RUGNETTA!??!??!?!!?!?!1?!??!!?!?!
He's got the fame and skills for it.
Nice "Derek Bailey" LP you got on the wall there! I remember years ago going into a record store looking at this record and thinking "this seems interesting...". I bought the damn thing and fell in love with European Free improvisation.
So the whole "everything is interactive" is kinda bullshit. I'm a video game theorist so I've thought and read about this a lot. The first dooderino to defend this idea was Barthes and it was then defended and built upon by Michel Charles in ‘Rhetorique de la lecture‘. Their idea is that you bring your own personality and therefore you are not completely "passive" during what we would usually call "a passive experience". Demonstrating that, Barthes developed the idea of a text containing "saillances" (saillant points) that mean you will have a heightened reading experience while reading some passages because of who you are and what you lived (being distressed during a violent scene if you've been exposed to violence for instance).
But that's really a low definition of what an action is… So if existing, thinking a little harder in an action, then everything is an action (and therefore the word is useless as a concept).
No, some medias (like games in general) are inter---active because they act upon you much like a book or movie does, but YOU act upon them. Actively. Like an activity. Like you actually DO something. Otherwise everything is interactive and so the word is useless.
The word _is_ useless in the absolute because it's completely relative. No true passiveness exists, therefore everything can be construed to some extent as interactive, that's it.
But that's just a theory AN IDEA CHANNEL THEORY
This is a tangent, but this video has me thinking about how the concept of "the medium is the message" extends to VR.
A lecture is hot because you get all the information served. You only have to listen and be a passive receiver . A seminar is cold cause it requires, not only for you to listen, but to actively participate in the learning process.
Paper is hot because, once you've changed its shape by either writing on it or folding it, you've changed its structure to be unable (or at least less able) to be reused and interacted with by other people. It is passive, and so is the phonetic alphabet. The phonems in a language are clearly defined, they are just passive, unchangeable means to deliver meaning.
Stone tablets are cold because they require our work to make them, to shape them and to give them meaning, which is later interpreted by others. Hieroglyphs are cold because they need interpretation. They were used by the priesthoods and they are a medium to tell a story, to guide a soul trough the afterlife, to name a thing, to engrave these things into eternity. They are a language that needs to be deciphered actively.
That's my opinion :)
oh dear, the last part of that comment is a mess. sorry English is my third language.
Mike, we don't need a Rock Star Media Theorist, when you're our Indie Media Theorist.
Nice invocation of House of Leaves.. That novel was so cool I started writing my own responses to the various editors and wrote another chapter / prolouge in the actual book, wrapping up both my additional layer of narration and my experience of reading it simultaneously. Similarly I think I read Ringworld in the same time period and had nearly zero involvement.. It was a very hot experience. So no, the medium isn't the message, it's content, and more specifically the unique gestalt between the content and individual, not form that drives hotness/coolness.
I think that hot and cold as a relational binary is most useful describing individual works within the same medium. It's hard to argue that Ulysses takes no audience participation as the audience is entirely responsible for its interpretation, nothing is given to you. Therefore Ulysses is cooler than something less symbolic and more literal... like Harry Potter or something. So too is Transformers 3 hotter than Godard. No judgement upon quality, just different amounts of work on the side of the audience.
+Sporsumus Torsumus Thanks! Although I'd prefer that point not penetrate my outer membrane.
+Sporsumus Torsumus That really would make a good scale when it comes to media, if beside a movie score rating included also was the average 'hot-cold' number so you know if your mind is active enough to get through it. People speak how for some things they have to be in the right mood, and maybe this can adequately be described using the hot-cold scale. When someone might be feeling very used up they would participate in something hot, and when they have energy to spare they'd go with cold. It wouldn't apply to everything, but certainly there is a gold truth in this to still be defined.
It's also interesting how this is a strange way of stereotyping certain mediums, that people assume it is all hot or cold when it can be greatly either way depending on the specific creation. Comic books and animated films used to be considered entirely 'simple' and 'kids stuff' but now are being more and more very capable of difficult concepts and a greater range than previously understood.
Actually, Harry Potter is really symbolic - I mean, the whole series is about death, grieving and accepting mortality. It also carries pretty heavy (and obvious) themes around racial purity and prejudice, and challenges the idea of people having a sealed fate which is coincidentally a really common theme in Greek mythology. I mean, I'm not trying to say it's more complicated than Ulysses or anything ridiculous, just that the whole series contains tonnes of symbolism. I think if anything, this shows that hot and cold is also related to the engagement of the individual - someone like me, a massive Harry Potter nerd, might engage with the series in a really cold way, whereas other people who aren't really so drawn into it will engage with it in a hot way. I think internet series like "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" are another great example of this - you get people who sit there rewatching and analysing the videos, and others who just think hey're funny/creepy and random.
I LOVE THIS SERIES. I love McLuhan. Even if you leave his ideas aside, his writing is so efficient. Reading him is... laborious in a fun way?
(I thought from the title that this would be about the increasing conflation of person and 'the stuff the person likes,' especially in online dating. This was better ;) )
"Whatever it is Zizek does" lol that cracked me up! 😁
this was amazing! hope these become monthly or something, itd really compliment the regular show :)
It all depends on the receiver. Based on how we interpret and act upon what we see or what we hear, the media/medium will either be hot or cold. To me, it's hot if you're interactive with it by getting your full attention and you're full on focused on it, but it's cold if it's something like music in the background or something that doesn't require your full attention and mental interactivity.
Since you(r graphics guy) brought up Infinite Jest, I read an interesting analysis that argued that the ubiquity of all those footnotes, and the necessity of reading them to fully understand not just context but the plot itself (though, in Infinite Jest plot and context quickly become somewhat indistinguishable) has the effect of forcing the reader to engage with the text not just mentally the way one would with any other highly complicated novel, but also physically by forcing the reader to constantly flip back and forth across almost a thousand pages every few minutes. This device essentially forces a level of active readership most other books find hard to match
I read his divide of form and content as rhetorical. There are times where i believed i was autistic because i paid excessive attention to words used rather than tonality. This is merely an error of employing hot listening to a cool communicator. By stating the medium is the message, an extreme idea, he helps me understand to put more faculties on intent and fewer on content.
there is a scene in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" where McLuhan make an appearance. While waiting in line for a movie, Woody pulls him into the scene from off screen (through the fourth wall).
It feels like there should be a playlist for this that includes earlier episodes that would have been in the "But Wait" series if it had existed when they were posted.
I agree with the point that hot and cold is more of a descriptive term for our own level of involvement with media, than with the media/medium itself. Two people may be reacting to the same text/work/song differently: the average person may put the radio on to have some noise in the background, while a musician may intently listen to and analyze the harmonies and production values within the same material. (yeah, I've been listening to Reasonably Sound) ... Noise music exists in an in-between realm for me--I can't just leave it on in the background because it's often too distracting or abrasive, yet I find it most affective when I am consciously trying to listen for patterns, shifts, anything that may fall back within a regular song structure, and am forced to give up trying to fit the song into my learned musical expectations.
Noise, and drone or other experimental genres, appeal to me because they are most often (but not always) initially approached with more attention on the part of the listener, yet are most effective when they defy expectation to the degree that one becomes overwhelmed, or made passive, like after the brain stops looking for melody 6 minutes into a 23 minute atonal piece. Sometimes these pieces can reveal how active our participation with media is on a less conscious level. It could even be said that a lot of media is hot only because we know what to expect from it, and that production values are not always relevant.
I spy House of Leaves in the background! I really need to get around to reading that...
what i hopped you talked about is the condition we are at the time we are watching or reading something, like if i come from work i will not be participating so much to the movie i am watching but if i watch it on a weekend, for example, i may even write a review about it
very nice, you should do McLuhan's Laws of Media next, as it brings in the evolutionary aspect of the media environment, especially after digital networked media, but McLuhan anticipated many of the general features, such as universal access to culture and i formation, inclusion of all previous media forms in the new electric (now digital) environment, etc. More than that, the LOM describe another aspect of how media interact with culture. Robert Logan has written on McLuhan as an evolutionary emergence theorist more recently in "McLuhan Misunderstood," which is very good.
When I watched this video i understood how important is speak english, because if you look for videos in spanish about Mcluhan, just find out poor information , but in English you've a lot of options. BUT WAIT!! Saludos !
This video is so cool it made me cooler. Thanks, Mike!
Bravo! Idea Channel reached a new level of quality in this video. I especially appreciate bringing Marshall into the library, he is as important today as ever. Yes there is no rockstar in media like him...except maybe Lynch. The acting narration was also greater.
I want to hear you singing "Fly me to the moon" hahaha
Sprinkle here, I know I definitely "Heat up" and "Cool down" from media to media, and even content to content.
Some examples. I heat up to Metal Gear Solid because I can that game with total immersion, requiring almost no input from me. I can just veg out, sneak around, and slit some throats!
I cool down when I play Dark Souls, because it requires A LOT of my attention, Neigh! DEMANDS My Attention!
Some radio stations I can Heat up to with good music and thoughtful engagement, while other radio shows I Cool Down to analyze, pick apart, and scream at my stereo in Angerbation™
Some places on the internet I can Heat Up to are Imgur, RUclips, and TeamSpeak. Places I Cool Down are Wikipedia and Reddit. I, as a consumer of media, change my temp depending on my mood, and what I am consuming.
But neither hot nor cold is an inherently good thing. There's a philosophy in entertainment that the brightest lights cast the harshest shadows, and to see in the dark you need a flickering candle to guide the way; to explain non-metaphorically, a dark tone needs fun moments, and a light tone needs serious or downright scary moments, otherwise your media fails at its intended tone. I think the same works here - Dark Souls, an overtly cold game, needs the "hot" action to engage the player; same with Undertale, the cold intellectuality of its deep message and at times excessive commentary needs a hot "quirky dynamic" to engage the player. Yet, a hot media without cold intellectual diversity is this thing we call "shovelware" or "pointless cash grabs". Not to say I want a lukewarm game, or that I want a molten wasteland sitting inside a frozen tundra, just that a single temperature breeds a completely unliveable climate. In fact, I'd prefer to live in a place with a colder temperature, a tundra even (game wise, I'm a Floridian) and it's perfectly okay for others to love a quite tropical place to stay. Just remember... Tropical climates like Florida have a nice oceanic breeze which makes them liveable, otherwise they become deserts. Those who live in cold climates need fires and heat to survive a place where little life has adapted. You can't have it just one way.
Thought I'd say happy birthday to Marshall McLuhan here while it's still July 1 in my time zone. Happy 106th!
I hated learning about McLuhan in university, because it seemed to me that even my professors had no idea how to define hot or cold media. For me I still struggle with what "participation" can mean; is it simply the energy we expel in interpretation? If so, doesn't every piece of media require interpretation by the viewer, no matter how simple? Does this only include our senses, or does it include our thoughts? If the latter, who stops thinking while they are consuming media all together??
Also, can participation only be the struggle to interpret, or can it also be a direct response to media? For instance, would a midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show be considered hot because it's film, or cool because of all the literal audience partici.......................pation?
I hate professors' interpretations of media. Academics is breeding a self-sustaining air of falsehood. Making stories isn't something you should be taught by philosophy or directors, but actual damn stories; basically, don't study Steven Spielberg or even anything the guy says, study his ET (the movie itself) instead. That's a concept largely lost to modern teachers, especially film and literature teachers, and if I told someone I decided to study things like Undertale and Cowboy Bebop to learn to make great media I'd probably be laughed out of the academic sphere (not that I have any incentive to take part in it anyway).
How humid is this media? What is this media's barometric pressure? But actually, great episode. Very interesting.
Well, I can see where Mcluhan was coming from. Even though we have a very active roll in our media consumption, you do not look at radio expecting to see or smell or taste or feel. You just listen. The same goes for all other types of media. You are expected to react in a specific way to a specific kind of media. The problem is that is work feels outdated. Media has evolved a lot in the last years and it became more and more consumer dedicated. It is no longer about providing a "service". It's about satisfying the users thirst. There are different expectations in what you are suposed to absorve and how you are suposed to interact with it. You no longer just listen to the radio.
Thanks for the video :)
Fan theory is, I think, the best support for your argument against hot and cold media. It shows just how far people are willing to go to interact with media of any kind.
I like the idea of this series immensely.
New sub. You’re smart. Great delivery.
"Ohhhhh NEXT!" - Bender Bending Rodriguez
Please! More McLuhan! I've been absorbed by his material for years now and I'm just appalled how little he's talked about today. He is one of the rare thinkers that has forever changed the way I look and think about the world. I think we could use a McLuhan revival.
What about radio talk shows that take live calls on studio? There's plenty of those.
This is an unusually hot episode for such a cold channel.
"You, Change yor mind, Like a girl, Changes clothes."
The main idea, as it seems to me, is that the hot/cold spectrum (and given one of the counterarguments, it might be best to consider the dichotomy as such), is mainly about how much influence the message, the difference being that this "influence" would be subconscious, and thus different from "interpretation". In this way, lectures and phonetic alphabets (with their precise meanings and relative lack of redundancies) would be classified as hot, while seminars and ideographic alphabets (with their redundant forms and more vague descriptions of a given reality) could be classified as cold.
Another way of clarifying the distinction would be on the terms of how much work the audience has to do in order to obtain a meaningful message from what was said; a cold medium requiring more effort than a hot one.
This does raise the point that two different messages in the same medium can be located in different places on the spectrum, that is: "Is a written scientific text hotter than a poem?". This question seemed to also emerge from the last part of the video, when it was pointed out that media aren't necessarily monolithic.
These are just my thoughts, and if someone more knowledgeable than me on this topic pointed out the fatal flaws in my reasoning, go ahead. I'm sorry for any eventually shady sentence construction, I promise my writing is much hotter in my native language (wait, I now realize the flaw with this terminology).
Anger for acknowledging internet explorer but not firefox!
The internet is not per definition very cold. In this model you can see it more as multimedia. You can use it to consume very difficult texts that you think about which are cold, or even converse with people in a very abstract way. Which is very cold, but binge watching short clips of little kitties gets into the very stimulating and hot territory.
OK, that was great and you guys do deserve the "postmodern hat award". Which should be in tints of "42 color'. Whatever that means in hexadecimal or something. That was just a great discussion on aesthetics.
Is "but wait" going to become the idea channel equivalent of "bonk", "pow", or another classic batman sound effect?
"If there'a one thing you've heard from Mcluhan its -"
Global Village????
"The Medium is the Message"
well that too I guess
also as an actual response to the video, I agree that media can't really be described as hot or cold anymore, especially with the use of the internet. The internet provides numerous ways for someone to continuously interact with any form of media however much they want. so while one person may be actively engaged with a tv show, watching it every day and talking online with others about it, another may just use that show as background noise. But then again I might only just be agreeing since I have a slight bias toward theories that present the audience as active decision makers and why my go to explanation for things is the "Uses and Gratification theory" lol
"Sure we have public intellectuals(...), but when it comes to people who talk about media or culture.. today we don't really have anyone who rolls as deep as Mcluhan did"
We have you, Mike Rugnetta.
And you use a nice mic with a classic FM broadcaster equalization!
Tabletop RPGs would be colder than cold.
I have to wonder modern video games would have been understood by him, given that it's a single "media" that includes such radically diverse experiences as Dwarf Fortress, Skyrim, Undertale and Hatoful Boyfriend.
It's the same for movies, books, etc. One thing the philosophy ignores is that tropical climates have this nice oceanic breeze to keep them from becoming these things called deserts, and tundras need fire and heat for us humans to live in their unforgiving environments. I'd say hot and cold is such a shallow definition from such an intellectual man, it's crazy.
You’re so underrated !!! ❤️❤️❤️
So, now TV is hot because the image improvement? I mean, when he wrote it most tv sets where black and white.
Dangit mike, you mentioned podcasts, but you haven't put out a podcast on reasonably sound since November! rectify this!
This hot/cold media thing has always been difficult for me to understand. Maybe finally I'm starting to understand it. I have the book: Understanding Media.
Well, I don't claim to be an expert on these things, but many people in these comments stated thusly -
Movies, defined as overtly "hot" by your main man, can be both hot and cold. An action movie or horror movie is low-intellectual yet easy to digest. Critics hate them, they often have abismal meta critic scores even if highly popular, but audiences love them (see: The Avengers and Paranormal Activity). Most small time Indie movies fail because they ask the audience to think about them deeply, for little reward. Yet even movies literally titled "Sex in 3D" (Sex in 3d? Really?! What was Sundance thinking?!) will get amazing metacritic scores almost consistently. Thus, as defined by one commenter in particular, critics are cold by nature and general audiences are hot by nature. Taking this further, many people concluded audiences overtly prefer a hot medium, not a cold one (although many others I saw would easily disagree).
After reading through many of the comments on this video, I now think too high a value is placed on intellectuality within media. Not that it doesn't matter at all, it's just defined as one single state of being when it's really more like fifty (I only define two here). People can be inspired to explore a concept by a depiction of something that sparks curiosity, or they can have a deep concept thrust in their face by a depiction of horror and violent persecution or even a direct attack on an ultimately harmless majority group; both are overtly cold media, and yet while the former is loved by a general audience the latter truly isn't even loved by critics. An intellectual media, as defined by the former, can be exponentially more popular than it would have been without the intellectual exploration, strong examples being One Punch Man and Undertale. These are both basically miniscule franchises made by some punk kid out of his basement, something that usually gets about a hundred to a thousand total sales and fans, yet the intellectual nature of both made them explode. And yet, there are millions of movies and games and books all made with the same mindset and the effect is simply absent.
I think another dichotomous yet necessary way to classify media, with the intent of learning more about it, is how easy to mentally digest the media is. We already use "detestable media", and this applies to Undertale and OPM perfectly. The message is presented very well - it's easy to understand, bundled in a fun package with quirky characters, yet ultimately invites exploration and discussion. This is what the maker of, say, "Sex in 3D" lacks - interest, accessibility, I dare say care and love for the medium (but that's probably my own personal bias against Sundance speaking - I had the chance to talk with them once upon a time, several members at that, and I chose to discuss the potential of fantasy as allegory. I was deeply curious as to why there isn't much of any true fantasy or science fiction in their works, instead trending a bit toward dramas and expensive on-location shoots. The conversation devolved into "well, if you want to make the next Paranormal Activity, you can go straight to Hollywood because we don't take that crap here." That literally broke my heart, though I've since recovered I still hold a grudge against the artists who insulted all my interests in one sitting.)
I'm all riled up now, goodbye concluding paragraph. Ah well, I'd rather not punch too deeply into this, I just wanted to give my two cents on why hot and cold fails as a classifying tool... you said it fails yourself, Mike, I really just had a different interpretation on the why and how I thought you'd like. I loved this episode, your show is great... keep up the good work, you're awesome! ^.*
Culture is a gumbo. You can pick the shrimp out of it, but it will still taste like the whole gumbo. You can serve it in a can or from a bag, fresh off the stove or frozen into cubes, but it's still a complex mix that will carry some hint of all the chef's preparation, the ingredients used, and your old childhood habit of putting ketchsup on everything.
Basically, I'm not sure you can separate out "media" and "message" enough to conflate them without using both ideas in the first place. Like, using a piece of string to help you navigate a labyrinth made of string. It's an interesting exercise, to be sure, and probably well worth while... but I'm not sure it's understanding.
Like, how would a totally alien species (who only uses sound for echo location and only experiences light in a general or ambient fashion) understand our media? Would it still be the message if it had to be massively transformed? Would a movie still be hot if it was dissected with the cool care of a xenoarchaeologist?
Or, how do I grock Mcluhan until I've had some of him over rice?
Haven't watched yet, but when Mike said "We're gonna call these videos, 'But wait'!" I got super excited.
I like this new format :)
Oohh, so this is where that new forms came from..!
Are those some Knights of the Slice in the background?
I wonder how Mcluhan would react to the integration of almost every form of media into social media. I remember an add camping, I think for Agents of Shield, where you take an image and played around with the filters on Instagram t fond a secret message.
Hey Mike, long time fan - first comment. Must... Banish... Shyness...
So, I think it's important to put this hot/cold dichotomy in context of a shifting social environment. I'd make the argument that as personal media, like Netflix, has become more ubiquitous, the sheer "action" behind mediums like movies, creates user participation. Going to the movies used to be hot - a monolithic element - but now, I have to put away my bunny pajamas, dress up, drive over to the theater after checking showtimes, make a hole in my schedule and shell out $14 in obligatory snack fees. Movies now seem like an event - almost like a concert, and that brings an element of awe to the movie media that might not have been present until recently. In contrast, now I can also put on my said bunny pajamas and watch an episode of sponge bob while doing the dishes. This is not to say that television is cold. As personal media has increased, stories in the genre have become more complex.
To overwhelm the comment, it seems like personal media, like Nerflix, has turned movies into short stories and complex television shows (House of Cards) into novels. This is very different from the SpongeBob episode - when I binge watch something - that becomes an event requiring participation.
My immediate reaction is agreement with the people who are saying that the hot-cold dynamic is better for comparing works within a particular medium than it is at comparing media. What this is really comparing then, at least to me, is how much interpretive effort a given work requires for optimal enjoyment of it. Some works are very straightforward in what is going on in them, and require no interpretive effort, while others have a layers of symbolism built in as critical elements, and come across like a cacophony of random stimuli if one isn't either seeking or finding that symbolism. We could probably also categorize audiences in a similar way, analyzing them based on how much they are willing, are capable, or even unintentionally do interpret works presented to them. However, as it seems to me that the most useful insight we could gain from that is how much interpretation the audience typically likes to be required of them by media they consume, describing works by how much interpretation they invite or demand seems to be the most useful thing gained.
This is interesting! To me, the hot-cold scale most closely evokes how "background" any particular piece of media in my life is. For instance, if I'm listening to music on my morning commute, that's probably more on the hot end - I'm not paying close attention; I just want something vaguely entertaining in my ears as I do something boring. If I'm listening to a podcast, however, that's probably in the middle - lukewarm, if you will. I can still multitask while listening to a podcast, but it has to be something a little simpler since a podcast demands more of my attention and thought. And if I'm watching a movie or TV show, that's on the cold end of the scale, because I want to be completely involved in that world - I can't multitask during that, except for maybe eating a snack.
But this is where it gets interesting, because I definitely think that one's upbringing affects how hot/cold you find different mediums. I grew up with very limited television access - when my parents let me have screen time, that time was devoted to watching the screen, and when it was over, the screen went off. There was never any TV in the background. Therefore, to this day I am amazed when people are capable of carrying on conversations, walking around, texting, etc. while watching movies. I worry that my friends are bored when this happens, but often they are enjoying whatever show I'm forcing them to watch - they just need to multitask. Anyway, that's a weird/cool thing I noticed recently.
So; you might say that in so far as TV is colder than film, that theatre is colder than TV?
But what about when the narrative breaks into a soliloquy? It's still theatre but at that point it becomes more like radio, with a very carefully crafted script and painstakingly refined delivery etc.
Perhaps a single piece, if it is of a medium which is extensive in time, can change 'temperature' back and forth as it progresses?
What springs to mind is RUclips Poop. When there's a bit with sentence mixing that would be hotter, but when it goes into a bit of noise or rhythmic skipping it would suddenly cool down.
Or perhaps this is just a feature of the fact that a lot of the things we call media are actually composites of multiple media; with YTP being made up of sentence mixing, skipping, pitch shift etc.
Or perhaps it'd be more accurate to refer to these simply as 'techniques', which can also have heat or coolness.
The idea that the medium only determines the hot/cold reception is not in your words "not sure, but I think, it's demonstrably false, even in McLuhan's time. Any given work can include the audience's interaction to greater and lesser extents - and will depend on the particular person. Poetry for example could be "intertextual" (i.e. have references within it to other poems) which requires the audience to "do work" to extract both pleasure and meaning from the poem. This applies to any media work - novels, comics, radio pieces, films, tv shows. And whether the audience member "does the work" to extract the meaning and pleasure of the intertext is up to the person involved. Highly intertextual works can be enjoyed by someone regardless whether they "get" the intertextual references or not. And this is only one aspect of the issue!
I also think about the way I "use" television. Especially now that "television" also includes the high-production-value serial works like The Wire, Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc, new "formats" like "reality tv", celebrity gossip shows, and the same old 1960s-values game shows, chat and variety shows, and sitcoms, etc. The high-production value shows exhibit the same high quality visual language as films with the long-form story telling arcs of traditional serial formats. But I use these "TV" shows differently. When I am tired and irritable after a hard day's work I find I don't want to watch such shows because I have to do more mental "work" to appreciate their high quality, whereas a half-hour of a suitably dumb low-bandwidth game show or sitcom allows me to veg out a little and relax. So that (for me at least) is exactly the _opposite_ to what McLuhan was saying! As well as showing the one "medium" (TV in this case) to actually have different form and not just content. It's the same with films (art films vs Hollywood blockbusters? Each has its charms, each needs different work from the audience) and books too, I think.
I think the essence still stands, although the range of media has expanded and there are far more blurred lines. RUclips, Podcasts, and social media don't fit as either hot or cold, but movies are even richer and more defined than ever, requiring far less active interpretation. Also... Radio has changed quite a bit. Other than talk radio, much of it is quite passive (hot).
I am glad you argued against hot and cold media! I was just about to virtually punch you in the face
I think it would be fair to say that there are some forms of media that are more likely to induce hotness or coldness in the audience. While a book or a film will often have people being active in their consumption, something like a video game requires you to be active.
Disclaimer: I am a professional McLuhan apologist.
Two things.
Thing the first: there is, buried in the footnotes of "Laws of Media," the understanding that media temperature is indeed a spectrum. A media is cooler or warmer depending on how much critical space the audience is given at the first moment of the experience of its meaning.
Thing the second: McLuhan makes allowances for the evolving medium as early as "Understanding Media," predicting that television will get, in some ways, hotter as the quality of the image improves. But the serial/episodic form of television makes it cooler; it calls upon the audience to recall the previous episodes, and this is a kind of participation. Superhero franchises are cooling cinema.
A shoutout for Douglas Rushkoff as a possible modern-day Mcluhan!