Hot, cold and lukewarm media

“You may laugh if you wish, many has done so before,

mocking these charlatans, looking through their acts,

scrutinizing their pretentious gestures with hard facts

Watch them fall into their pools of self-indulging lore,

and have pity on their retraction from the realities of life”

V. Been

40 years ago, Marshall McLuhan wrote about media being hot or cold. His definition of a hot medium was one that extends a single sense in “high definition”, where he defined high definition as being well filled with data. As examples of hot media he used photographs or a radio. Related to this, he also describes hot media as being low in participation, while cold media are high in participation or completion by the audience.

“One man can tell the tales of a thousand; a thousand men cannot tell the tale of one” – V. Been

In pedagogy, one way of categorizing communication is as being either one-way or two-way. One-way communication is as would be expected characterized by consisting of a communicator and an audience. All communication goes one way, from the communicator to the audience. Examples are speeches, radio and web pages. In two-way communication, the audience is allowed or even encouraged to participate in the communication. Examples are telephone conversations, online chat or lectures where the professor engages the audience to ask questions and enter their own experiences and opinions into the lecture. It is however worth noting that all two-way communication can be viewed as one-way communication if the time frame is small enough, and that most one-way communication can be viewed as two-way if the time frame is large enough. Although an article in the newspaper is considered one-way communication, considered in a time span containing answers and opposing articles, the entire communication takes on a two-way behaviour.

“A straight line runs in circles” – V. Been

McLuhan’s notion of hot and cold media seems to rest on rather unqualified and vague definitions. How “hot” or “cold” a medium is has little to do with the amount of information given, or the openness to participate in the communication. Rather, the temperature of the communication lies in the communication itself and the effect it has on the participants. A seminar can easily be less participative than a lecture, if the communicators on both sides either do not communicate well or do not do so in a way that sparks the communication partners. When the Compac Disc technology first arrived a little more than 20 years ago, it was criticized by so-called stereophiles, or music connoisseurs, for being too explicit. Listening to a CD was too overwhelming when it came to sound, it simply disclosed too much of it. After all, when you paint your house, you do not want it to be all the colors of the rainbow; you want it to be a color you like.

“What fills your eyes can empty your mind” – V. Been

This can be related to McLuhan’s “hot” media. If the media contains enough information, it can become redundant and un-engaging, but not necessarily for the right reasons. If the CD players made the un-intended sounds from the instruments come out into the sound picture, this would also be a reason for losing interest in the music itself, as the listener would be distracted from the musical experience. On the other hand, a medium that does not contain much information can easily also become un-interesting, unless it sparks the audience’s interest in filling out the missing information from their own experience and fantasy. However, this has little to do with the amount of information as such, but rather with the interest it creates with the audience. One viewer might be fascinated by Rembrandt’s “The man with the golden helmet” while another may just think it’s a man with a golden helmet on.

“It’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong” – J.M. Keynes

Thus, the notion of hot and cold media is of little use when trying to understand how communication occurs, whether over the Internet or elsewhere.

Stian V Lofstad