Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Today, McLuhan’s schema as applied to the Internet might look like the

following:

THE INTERNET

PRINT IMAGE

WRITTEN WORD ICON

SPEECH VISUAL COMMUNICATION

These layers of technological worlds, past and present, intensify the work

of processing meaning which confronts consumers immersed in the

different mediums. This process work becomes heightened to the point

where we have to be educated and inducted into it as increasingly infor-

mation has to be produced by the audience or the receiver.

McLuhan’s primary distinction that is relevant here is that between

‘hot’ and ‘cool’ mediums.^22 Hot mediums like radio and cinema circulate

a large amount of information, bombarding the viewer or listener.

Relatively little is required in order to interpret them. Cool mediums, on

the other hand, presuppose interaction. McLuhan’s assumption is that in

hot mediums there is an overdose of information, and there is little need

for interactivity, for ‘active’ participants, or for participation at all.

Later in Understanding MediaMcLuhan begins to describe the demise

of mechanical media like print in making way for technologies of

‘automation’ like radio and television as part of what he calls the ‘cyber-

nation’ transformation of modern society. It is the electronic instantaneity

of radio and TV which consolidates the hegemony of mass media over

older mechanical technologies of reproduction.

Automation brings in real ‘mass production’, not in terms of size, but of an

instant inclusive embrace. Such is also the character of ‘mass media’. They

are an indication, not of the size of their audiences, but of the fact that ever y-

body becomes involved in them at the same time. (McLuhan, 1994: 372)

In other words, the significant property of broadcast which McLuhan

zeros in on is its ‘live’ character. Here it is the fact that a broadcast com-

munication is live for the audience, rather than live at the point of produc-

tion. The content of the transmission could have been prepared earlier

or at the same time as the audience is consuming it. However, McLuhan

is, of course, not interested in the content, but in the way the audience is

merely a constituted reflex of the medium itself. Insofar as the media

achieve cybernation, ‘the consumer’ of a message also ‘becomes producer

in the automation circuit, quite as much as the reader of the mosaic tele-

graph press makes his own news, or just ishis own news’ (McLuhan,

1994: 372). The value of McLuhan’s analysis here is that he suggests that

an electronic assembly or ‘virtual’ assembly does not have to be dialogical

or equal, or even have ‘high participation’, in order to guarantee mutual

presence. Even if the vast majority of ‘participants’ in a medium are

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