Just what I needed during two days spent sick in bed: more media theory to make my head swim.
I’m just glad Marshall McLuhan is dead, so he can’t appear to me as he did to that guy on the line waiting to get into a movie in Annie Hall, and tell me, “You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you came to (take) a course in anything is totally amazing!”
But risking a visit by his apparition in my delirium, I’ll essay an opinion on his seminal work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
I’ll give him this–if he were directing a monster movie, he obviously wouldn’t be the type of director who makes his audience wait for a glimpse of the monster, because he presents his monster in full in his opening frame: “the medium is the message”.
To understand what he means by this we must first understand that he defines “media” as “any extension of ourselves”, which is to say any new technology. The introduction of these new technologies change what’s possible, so the “message” of any medium is not the content it produces but the new context it creates: “the change in scale or pace or patterns that it introduces into human affairs”.
Though this has the effect of re-ordering our thinking, too often we get focused on the “medium” to the point that we miss the message. Thus oil companies are yoked to the belief that their business is leeching oil from the earth and refining it, instead of meeting the ever-increasing energy needs of society, or Xerox lets Steve Jobs walk off with the products of their research park, because it believes its mission is to make copies rather than to facilitate information dispersal.
McLuhan goes on to distinguish between “hot” and “cold” types of media, with “hot” media defined as those that “extend one sense in high definition”. Hot media supposedly require less of the recipient, because so much information is being provided to them, whereas “cool” media require more participation from the recipient. He claims movies, radio, and print are examples of hot media, whereas television, the telephone, and speech are examples of cool media.
Quite honestly, if media had to be sorted into sides of a McDLT container, I don’t think I’d be up to the task, because I have a hard time understanding why McLuhan labels film as a “hot” medium, and television as a “cool” one. Maybe it’s a product of having grown up during a time when our movie screens have shrunk while our television screens have grown bigger and the reception clearer, but I don’t draw much of a distinction between film and television.
Cue the ghost.
